The Chicago Complaints Choir was looking for a good way to collect new complaints so we can write a new song or two. I’ve been meaning to learn Rails, but couldn’t scrape up the motivation without something “real” to work on. And thus a giant robot was born…

Announcing the Complain-O-Tron 3000™: Complain Here!

Please send in your complaints about anything, one by one, whenever you think of one, and get them off your chest!

• SuperSync: Ugly, but it’ll get the job done. The interface design wreaks of Windows and Java, by which I mean: it’s tastelessly done, but tolerable. I’m reluctantly throwing my lot in with this one, because I couldn’t find anything better, and need our libraries synced this week, and without too much fuss.
• TuneRanger: AWFUL. Ugly, slow, poorly designed. Run away! I can only hope that more thought was put into the underlying sync process than what went into the “design” of this steaming turd. I stopped it before it had a chance to ugly up our computers. It was so miserable that I did not trust it enough to allow it to even attempt to sync any songs.
• Syncopation: Might work OK for casual users, but it totally choked under the enormity of my music library. The interface needs a radical re-design. It really makes you jump through too many hoops if you want to be selective about what you sync.

That is all. Good day.

This command will tell you the top 10 things you’ve been typing in the shell.

isaac$ history|awk '{a[$2]++} END{for(i in a){printf "%5d\t%s\n",a[i],i}}'|sort -rn|head
  101   nosetests
   68   paster
   45   cd
   38   ls
   34   hg
   25   rake
   21   script/server
   21   script/generate
   16   sync
   16   rm

Yes, despite being a total Python freak, I’m using Rails a bit lately. I kinda like 2.0… it’s much more polished than 1.x… but so far I still like Pylons + Elixir better… subjectively. It’s too soon to say whether that’s just my relative amount of experience in each framework. I’ve been using Python for years, and Pylons for enough time to know it very well. But I’ve only been dabbling in Rails and Ruby.

I have this sort of tic where I type sync all the time. I picked it up from a sysadmin I knew back in the day (late nineties, remember Mosaic?). I didn’t know so much Unix back then (or was that Solaris flavor?) and I saw him type it all the time and I figured it’s just what you do right after you do something else. It’s useless now, but I still type it all the time anyway without even thinking about it. It just flushes buffers to disk. Back then, on that particular web server (probably a pre-1.0 Apache), my changes to sites would not show up if I didn’t run sync, so it became this ingrained habit to type it after changing anything, and I still do it 10+ years later.

And I’m sure typing hg a lot lately. I’ve switched every project I’m in control of (at home and at work) from subversion to mercurial. Yep, it’s that awesome, and I doubt I’ll be looking back. Not to say something better won’t come along one day, but for now it’s the bees knees in version control.

Positioning and sizing of elements relative to others. Grouping of elements. I want to say #a #b and every div.awesome constitute a group named #superGreat, and then be able to say that #c should always appear below that group, or to the right of it, or 23 ems from the top left of the group. I want to say that every item in that group should have the height of the tallest one among them, based on its content… or that all the members should have their bottom edges aligned, and the tops move down based on each element’s size.

I realize that this is difficult to implement in a rendering engine because an amateur could easily create circular dependencies (to name just one of many). I’m not opposed to the browser throwing an error dialog in this situation. We’re all grown-ups here, and if you can’t think through your design well enough to avoid infinite recursion, then you need to think it through again.

Next, I want to have variables where I can define a set of color, borders, backgrounds, or whatever, and then apply that set of styles to other elements.

That’s about as simply as I can say it. That’s what I want from CSS3. Give me those in every browser and maybe I’ll stop complaining. That’s not true. I joined the Chicago Complaints Choir for cripes sake. But give me those things, and I’ll complain about something else instead. How’s that for a deal?

I suppose it’s possible they came up with it independently, but that seems unlikely. That leaves the other possibilities… it was a deliberate nod, an homage, a tip of the hat or … just a plain old rip off. Time will tell.

(Note: the links on the song titles go directly to each song in the iTunes store. Listen for yourself.)

I like biking to work. Obviously, it’s good exercise. It’s cheap, faster than the train (in my case, at least) and it’s not killing Mother Earth much. I’m sure the production and transportation of new bikes and tires does a little damage–you always have to consider the whole process–but not nearly as much as a city-dweller’s usually-unjustifiable SUV.

On the way to work, I was going through an underpass that has no bike lane. See, Chicago claims to be oh-so-bike-friendly, except for all the places where the bike lanes just disappear for a few blocks, usually in the kind of busy places where you’d need one the most (I do appreciate the gains made on this front in recent years, but there is much more to do). So this guy in a van is inconvenienced by my presence for literally 8 or 9 seconds, but he can’t handle it gracefully. As we emerged from the underpass, I moved to the side, and he swerved around me and squawked nasally, “eeeee-Yaaa, I’m thinkin’ maybe the sidewalk?”

This type of situation is where my near total lack of machismo really pays off.

I caught up to him at the next light and stopped at his window. If I were a macho manly man I might have shouted at him, insulted his genitals, made fun of his uncanny resemblance to Grampa Simpson, and perhaps even kicked a noteworthy dent into his door. But no, I turned to him and said, “You’re not allowed to ride bikes on the sidewalks here,” and rode along.

Sometimes, I’m too nice. Or am I? That sentence totally stumped the guy. His jaw dropped and he couldn’t think of anything to say back. So maybe it was the right thing to say, and maybe got him thinking about how crazy he was acting.

Later, on the way home, I was again on a street with no bike lane. As the bike safety rules included on the official 2007 Chicago Bike Map recommend, I was riding just to the left of a right turn-only lane (since I was not planning to bike on the highway). A guy with an uncanny resemblance to Kent Brockman rolled up in some kind of Canyonero and boomed, “nice spot!”

I just kept riding, but couldn’t resist flippin’ him the bird as he turned onto the highway.

Sigh…

I just wonder what’s so damn difficult about slowing down briefly to allow a biker to ride safely and without undue stress? Are you in such a hurry to reach the next red light? Is your love for traffic jams so great that you can’t wait an extra 5 seconds to get into that line of cars stuck in the on-ramp?

People in cars, please calm down. And get over yourselves, OK?

(And stop looking like Simpsons characters, while you’re at it.)

Related Reading

• 5 Powerful Reasons to Drive Slower, and How to Do It

Prerequisite: this won’t work unless you have most or all of your music in iTunes, you’ve rated most of your collection, and you use iTunes and/or an iPod to listen to it most of the time. Otherwise move along, nothing to see here.

Create a Smart Playlist (option-command-N).

Here’s what mine looks like:

(click the image to see it full size)

You’ll need to make some adjustments to Play Count and Skip Count, since your counts are surely different from mine. Depending on how you use star ratings, you might want to adjust that part, too.

The Skip Count is a fascinating way to study your own taste. It helps you find those songs that you aren’t ready to admit you dislike, and the songs that you only like when you’re in the mood for them. My favorite use of Skip Count is for uncovering songs you feel compelled to like for some reason (such as their popularity), but you don’t. Deleting them is fun.

I have a regular (not “Smart”) playlist called “Worn out for now” where I put songs that I don’t want to overplay and ruin (I have lots of music that I loved and now can’t bear to hear because I overplayed it back in the day, so this is my weird way to prolong my ability to enjoy great music). I exclude any song on that list, because it’s already overappreciated.

It’s a good idea to exclude non-music Genres, or ones you don’t really want popping up randomly.

So once you’ve done that, go to Party Shuffle and select the list. Go back and tweak the numbers until you find the sweet spot.

Enjoy the songs you’ve forgotten!

My first computer was the venerable Commodore 64, and I quickly taught myself to program by typing code out of magazines and then seeing what happened, and then trying out my own ideas.

I got to be pretty good at it. And like most kids, I had to go to various department stores with my parents or grandparents and they’d often leave me in the computer section while they were off getting socks and cat food.

The little impromptu program I’d write would:

• disable the “Run/Stop” key
• start a countdown timer for 1 minute
• put an obnoxious message on the screen
• start the screen flashing through every possible combination of text & background colors
• play a terrible siren-like noise

Then I’d turn the volume all the way up, run the program, and get far enough away that I wouldn’t be seen, sometimes I’d go down the escalator, just close enough to hear.

I did that to every department store Commodore 64 that crossed my path for quite a few years.

So to all you department store computer salesmen (they were always men) who had to figure out how to make it stop… well, you got what you deserved. I did it because every one of you would treat me like an idiot if I had any questions or wanted to chat with you about computers. I laughed my ass off every time, and you never caught me. Sometimes it took you a long time to figure out where the volume knob was.

Remember this story next time you’re busy underestimating a 12 year old.

“Please state the nature of the computational emergency.”

(And there have been many of them the last few days, so I kinda feel a little robotic.)