thomasrhiel

Why is subscribing to The New York Times so complicated?

Tue, 27 Dec 2011 16:31:00 -0500

That’s Khoi Vinh’s question, and it’s one that I had a few months ago when I had just moved into an apartment and was deciding which subscription to get. The complexity of the digital-only options, which Khoi discusses, ultimately led me to choose a weekend print subscription, which includes access to the website and both the iPhone and iPad applications. (I also enjoy flipping through the beautifully designed weekend magazines, whose digital incarnations, squeezed into web and app templates, I find much less engrossing.)

The treatment of the iPhone and iPad apps is particularly weird, I think. It makes no sense that subscriptions to the apps are sold separately (in a web + iPhone app package and a separate web + iPad app package), and it certainly makes no sense that the two packages are priced differently. I suppose I’d be more inclined to pay a premium for the iPad app if it were great, but it’s still a poor substitute for the print Times and a poorer substitute, in my opinion, for nytimes.com.¹

This is a separate post, I think, but the design of the Times iPad app is, in my view, an argument against a rigid application of gridded conformity. It’s boring to read the Times on a tablet when every swipe reveals a page that looks identical to the last. Khoi, whose design for the Times’s website is still in place, literally wrote the book on designing with grids, and yet that site is as varied and surprising as the iPad app is lifeless. ↩

Proverbial Wallets

Wed, 21 Dec 2011 14:50:00 -0500

An earlier project from Supermechanical, the same group responsible for the buzzy Kickstarter project Twine. The wallets, which monitor your bank accounts electronically, come in three flavors: one that vibrates to reflect account activity, one that swells and deflates, and one that becomes increasingly harder to open as one’s funds run low.

Caught my eye.

Hitchens

Fri, 16 Dec 2011 22:51:00 -0500

I cannot think of a person alive with such a virtuosic control of rhetorical English, both spoken and written. It was his God Is Not Great that cemented my high school-era rejection of religion and encouraged my project of intellectual self-invention as I entered college.

He fortunately persists on YouTube.

Apt

Thu, 15 Dec 2011 22:47:00 -0500

Over the past two months, I’ve spent many a weekday evening with my nose pointed downward into a programming book. The result of this study and effort, which I’m today nudging forward out into the world, is Apt, a web app that allows roommates to keep track of their spending. (Have a roommate who never quite pays her share of the bills or — as in my case — always seems to buy the milk and orange juice before you’ve had a chance? Apt helps you keep tabs on such things.)

I’m hosting Apt and writing about it for two reasons:

It’s my first substantial foray into programming. I’m happy with it, but I also want to expose it to the light of day. I ask, humbly, for your feedback.
It works, and some of you may find it useful.

Beginning an education in programming on one’s own, I’ve found, is not easy. We don’t lack for excellent —and free — resources: Chris Pine’s Learn to Program is an exceptionally clear and friendly introduction to Ruby, and Michael Hartl’s thorough Ruby on Rails tutorial is equally terrific. No single resource, though, can bottle up and serve something as complicated and dynamic as programming in general and web application development in particular. There are simply too many subtleties, too many edge cases, too many moving parts. Focusing on this project, though, helped me avoid becoming overwhelmed by the breadth and intricacy of this landscape.¹ Rather than drown trying to absorb a thick reference book’s worth of information, I could, at each step of this process, identify a handful of immediate challenges and work one-by-one to overcome them. It wasn’t always easy, but it was almost always fun.

The following free resources, supplementing what I learned from Pine and Hartl, also proved useful:

RailsCasts — brief Rails screencasts by Ryan Bates, each on a particular topic
Rails for Zombies — a sequence of tutorial videos, with a cute/corny Zombie theme, that provides a general overview of Ruby on Rails
Stack Overflow — a programmer forum that can be a godsend when trying to resolve a one-off roadblock²

I am a beginner, and Apt is the product of a beginner’s efforts. If you decide to try it out and you notice bugs, or if you otherwise have complaints, please let me know. I have no plans to expand Apt substantially, but I would like to make it good.

37 Signals wrote an excellent blog post about the usefulness of such a project when learning to program. ↩
Then again, Stack Overflow itself can be a source of frustration. ↩

Top two British television things I’ve enjoyed recently

Thu, 08 Dec 2011 22:12:00 -0500

Peep Show¹ — a light comedy about two British males struggling to find fulfillment in their relationships and careers. (Available, at least at the moment, on Hulu)
The Trip² — a grimmer comedy about two British males struggling to find fulfillment in their relationships and careers. (Available, at least at the moment, on Netflix)

Credit where it’s due. Cat Chong, cracking open her laptop with excitement, introduced me to this show. ↩
You may have seen the very enjoyable “This is How Michael Caine Speaks” YouTube video. It’s a clip from this. ↩

Scott Conant makes a mean spaghetti, and I (and you!) can make a pretty good one

Fri, 08 Jul 2011 14:40:00 -0400

Here’s something that you should try: chef Scott Conant’s famous spaghetti with buttery tomato sauce. You can pay $24 for it at Scarpetta, or you can follow this recipe and make it yourself. I can vouch for its easiness and deliciousness. Recommended!

A few comments, if you do go ahead and make it:

Peeling the tomatoes — which you do by boiling them for 15 seconds, putting them into some ice water, and then picking at the skin with a paring knife — is a surprisingly fun way to spend a few minutes!
At Scarpetta, the tomato sauce is smooth. But mine ended up with a few chunky, fibrous bits, and I think that’s because the fresh tomatoes I used had centers that were tougher than their soft outer flesh. When you’re squeezing the seeds out, since you’re already being fussy, consider cutting out the little tomato hearts.
Be careful how much oil you initially put in the tomato sauce pan. The recipe calls for two tablespoons, but when I see something like that I usually just eyeball it and pour a little pancake in the middle of the pan. But I ended up with a sauce that was too oily, so next time I’m actually going to measure out those two tablespoons.
You make a basil- and garlic- and red pepper-infused oil with this recipe, and it says to let it steep for 20 minutes. But, it continues, “The longer you let the oil sit, the more infused the oil.” So I let it sit for 30 minutes. Why not? But it turns out there is a “why not”: the flavor of those little red pepper flakes seeps out and actually makes the oil pretty spicy — too spicy, really. So either use less than a “generous” pinch of red pepper flakes or let the oil sit for just about 20 minutes.
This recipe calls for two tablespoons of butter, which is what makes this recipe, I think. I was making a half recipe, so I used one. But you know what? I could have used a little more. Maybe that’s just me. So consider going generous on the butter. The sauce really should look a little orange, not bright tomato red.

This has been today’s episode of “Cooking with Thomas”! Be sure to tune in tomorrow.

Turkey and Greece are nice places to visit

Fri, 08 Jul 2011 00:41:45 -0400

I put some pictures up. You should check ‘em out!

I'm back!

Thu, 07 Jul 2011 00:36:20 -0400

I’ve just returned from an incredible two weeks in Turkey and Greece. I’ll soon try to put together an album of the highlights, but for now, here’s a picture of the Temple of Zeus in Athens (along with my brother Andy).

What example did he adduce to induce Stephen to deduce that originality, though producing its own reward, does not invariably conduce to success?

Thu, 16 Jun 2011 12:35:00 -0400

His own ideated and rejected project of an illuminated showcart, drawn by a beast of burden, in which two smartly dressed girls were to be seated engaged in writing.¹

It’s Bloomsday! And Ryan Lizza is really going at it. ↩

I just updated the look of this here blog

Wed, 15 Jun 2011 02:54:45 -0400

I never loved how this blog page used to look, so I tweaked it. My CSS muscles needed the exercise.¹

And thank you, Amrita, for helping me with these footnotes. ↩

Has anyone else dreamt of a Chipotle for Italian food?

Tue, 14 Jun 2011 17:55:55 -0400

A few good people in my hometown of Columbus have made it happen.

Love this.

Wed, 08 Jun 2011 15:48:00 -0400

Love this.

I read a book: Alex Ross's 'The Rest Is Noise'

Wed, 08 Jun 2011 15:29:52 -0400

For readers, like me, interested in the weird world of twentieth-century classical music and looking to supplement a foggy, gap-filled understanding of it, this book, which was a well-reviewed “New York Times Editors’ Pick” kind of thing when it came out a few years ago, is a handy survey. It is not, as Ross claims introductorily, an expansive discussion of twentieth-century music in general. It’s a book about the likes of Stravinsky, Cage, Reich, and Glass, not John, Paul, George, and Ringo.

To a surprising extent, the story of twentieth-century music is the story of twentieth-century politics, and Ross proves to be an able historian. (If you’re dying to know which members of the Second Viennese School were Nazi sympathizers, this is the book for you.) But Ross really shines as a writer when he’s describing actual music. Such descriptions constitute about 25 percent of this book’s mass, I’d say, and most are beautifully done. They not only give the reader a strong whiff of each composition’s mood, but they also evince Ross’s deeply felt passion for his subject.

I wonder, though, what this book would look like if it came out, say, ten years from now, when digital publishing has had more time to mature. Because as effective as Ross is at capturing a few phrases of music in words, prose is no substitute for the real thing. As I read The Rest Is Noise, I was constantly typing the names of compositions into YouTube so I could hear the real stuff for myself. (To this end, Ross has compiled a separate listening guide on his website.) An audio-rich digital version of The Rest Is Noise, while likely obviating the need for some of Ross’s beautiful descriptive writing (and entailing a few annoying copyright headaches), would nevertheless make for a much better book.

Vintage Map of the Mississippi River’s Meanderings.

Wed, 08 Jun 2011 11:24:00 -0400

Vintage Map of the Mississippi River’s Meanderings.

By Chris Johanson

Wed, 01 Jun 2011 13:38:00 -0400

By Chris Johanson

People in Ohio are very, very worked up about OSU football coach Jim Tressel's resignation.

Tue, 31 May 2011 12:05:00 -0400

People in Ohio are very, very worked up about OSU football coach Jim Tressel's resignation.:

Why is it, again, that OSU and other institutions supposedly devoted to “higher education” are in the business of operating extremely resource-intensive athletics programs made possible by exploiting the egos of — and disregarding, for the most part, the “educational” interests of — “student athletes,” most of whom have no hope of playing professional ball? Money, obviously, and probably something like “prestige.” (Non-Ohio people, you’d be amazed — or, rather, you probably wouldn’t be — at how OSU athletics is simultaneously packaged and sold by the pound, in the form of scarlet and gray shirts and foam fingers and grilling equipment, and swathed in a transcendental and occasionally straight-up Christian mythos of Tradition and Honor.)

Is it possible to dial back these sprawling apparati? If OSU President Gordon Gee’s successor approaches a press conference microphone and clears his or her throat and says that maybe, you know, this sort of athletics program isn’t really in keeping with the university’s academic mission, which really does rest upon certain values and traditions — how quickly will he or she be driven, with scathing talk radio commentary and maybe even actual pitchforks, straight out of town?

Ebooks, you're doing it wrong

Mon, 30 May 2011 18:13:00 -0400

After having read several ebooks in the very popular and enthusiastically marketed Kindle and iBook formats, I can vouch for the claim that ebook typography is terrible. Dashes do indeed become hyphens. Section headings are indeed stripped of their boldfacedness. Etc. These are minor irritants, yes. The world has more pressing concerns. But ebooks, while less expensive than their paper and ink counterparts, still aren’t cheap, and it’s obnoxious to pay twelve bucks for something, crack it open — “crack it open” — and find mistakes that could have been corrected by a Knopf intern taught how to make regular text bold.

Another example. I have not examined a physical copy of Alan Brinkley’s The Publisher, but I would bet that, in the middle of chapter 5, one will find the 20 or so glossy pages of captioned photographs that one often finds bound in the center of history books. Because for no good reason at all, that — right there in the middle of the chapter, between two adjacent paragraphs — is where they appear in the ebook.

With a little effort, the makers of The Publisher’s digital incarnation could have one-upped the printed book by positioning these photographs to accompany relevant bits of Brinkley’s text, illustrating, e.g., a description of Henry Luce’s childhood with a photo of Luce as a toddler. You can’t do that sort of thing in an old-fashioned book book, where the difficulties of using glossy paper (the cost, the positioning of glossy pages in arbitrary spots throughout the text) sink the whole prospect. You can get that fancy — “fancy”; this is simple stuff — in an ebook.

But no. The people behind The Publisher didn’t take the time. They didn’t even move these photo pages out of chapter 5 to, say, their own section at the end of the book. They just left ‘em.

It makes me wonder if people are reading over these things before they’re Kindlized or turned into iBooks.

I read a book: James Gleick's 'The Information'

Thu, 26 May 2011 00:38:00 -0400

It’s a little hard to describe what this book is about. It’s not about communications technologies, although they’re in there, from African talking drums to the Internet. It’s not strictly about information theory, although an important pioneer in that field, Claude Shannon, has something of a starring role. It’s kind of about how the former led to the latter—how technologies like the telephone helped birth a much more abstract approach to understanding the conveyance of information, one founded in mathematics and formal logic instead of, say, electrical engineering.

But The Information doesn’t limit himself to that single narrative. Gleick can’t seem to resist throwing as much trivia into his book as he was able to dig up. And so we read about the travails of the first dictionary publisher, the early drafts of Samuel Morse’s electric telegraph code, the never-actually-built-but-nevertheless-famous mechanical computing machine of the 19th-century polymath Charles Babbage.

I loved this book. I wish there was more of it.

I read a book: Clay Shirky's 'Here Comes Everybody'

Thu, 26 May 2011 00:07:00 -0400

My sense is that this book, when it first came out in 2008, was something of a big deal. It became a sacred text of social media gurus and the effusively technoutopian. In 2011, though, it’s lost some of that aura. Yeah, Wikipedia has more potential than the Encyclopedia Britannica ever did. Yeah, Twitter (which was new in 2008), allows political activists to share news with the outside world. We know.

I can’t complain, really. It’s my own fault for reading this thing three years too late. It’s a testament to Shirky’s careful argumentation that most of his analysis has held up, and it’s an indication of the staggering dynamism of our technological age that a book like this, which came out when I was a freshman in college, can seem so stale now.

If, like me, you’ve been hearing about this book for years and feeling guilty about not having read it, pick it up, give it a skim, and cross it off your list.

I read a book: Alan Brinkley's 'The Publisher'

Wed, 25 May 2011 23:49:00 -0400

This is a competently composed biography and a decent read. Brinkley, whose class on postwar America I took this past semester, has not taken any chances, formal or stylistic, with this book. It’s a straight shot, a blow-by-blow chronological story, and so the most interesting moment—the remarkable account of how Henry Luce and Brit Hadden, two 24-year-olds, founded Time magazine—comes early. The rest is, by comparison, less lively: Hadden loses interest in Time and dies suddenly, and Luce turns into something of an unlikable curmudgeon who begins to care more about conservative politics than journalistic innovation.

Still, for anyone curious about the early, headier days of the newsmagazine business, the book is worthwhile.