Winning the MPG/0-60 tradeoff

A friend of mine just bought a car.  He happily told me it gets amazing gas mileage and accelerates great from a stop.  I smiled and kept my mouth shut; I've seen the car's spec sheet so I know it's not fast, but why spoil his fun?  On the other hand, instead of pitying his misunderstanding, maybe I should envy him for successfully faking himself out:  he got the feeling of acceleration without paying for actual acceleration.

He traded in a giant American V8 sedan with some unholy level of horsepower.  I'd been in that car - driven it, even - and I know he liked the power.  His new car is a VW Passat TDI.  That's also a full-sized sedan, and not a lightweight one, but the TDI engine makes about half the horsepower his last car did.  It gets from zero to 60 about one second faster than a Prius.  So how is it that he's so happy about its acceleration?

Answer:  it's a diesel.  Power is torque times RPM, and diesels tend to have a lot of torque but they can't rev to high RPMs.  So when the light turns green and you step on the gas, a diesel makes a deep HURRRRR sound instead of the higher pitch of a gas engine.  Psychologically, in your head you're expecting that deep tone to go along with lazy acceleration, but the diesel's torque accelerates you better than you expect.  It feels fast.

Car design involves compromises.  Quick cars tend to be thirsty.  My friend values fuel mileage, so he found a way to be happy with the acceleration of a fuel-efficient car:  he's fooling himself.  He probably even knows it, he's got an engineering degree.  But I'm not going to be a jerk and point it out, and risk ruining it for him.  I wouldn't want someone to pull a hipster move like that on me.

Shared comment streams between Blogger and Google+

Google has just announced that Blogger can now display comments submitted by your Google+ contacts.  Blogger already provides the option to automatically post your new blog posts to Google+; as best as I can tell from the screenshots of the new service, comments made on your Google+ post can now appear on your blog.

I don't yet know if comments made directly on your blog by people who aren't on Google+ will appear on Google+.  The new option hasn't yet been enabled in my Blogger dashboard so I can't check for myself; my older cross-posts with comments in Blogger do not show up on Google+ as having comments, but that doesn't mean that it won't work that way moving forwards.

This move is doubtless in response to the shared Facebook comment streams that are finding increasing use. Bloggers posting a link on their Facebook page to one of their blog posts can set up a similar two-way interaction.  It solves the problem of where to comment - on a friend's blog directly, whose archive they control?  Or on their Facebook page where the interaction might be seen by more people?

I haven't spent much time on Google+, but I know people who do.  A truly integrated comment stream would be a welcome addition, and might actually get me to connect with more people in Google+.  At present, my blog has trimmed back down to much like what it was in 2008:  public but unadvertised, read by only a few family members and local friends.  I still co-organize a blogger group, but my outreach died down with the decrease in activity of the Cleveland Social Media Club.  That could change.

The Black Angels at the Beachland, v2.0

There's a certain transcendence I reach under the correct conditions of alcohol, volume, and other undetermined factors.  I almost got there last night.  Almost - but not quite.

I first saw the Black Angels at the Beachland over three years ago.  I had only a passing familiarity with their recorded output and was on the fence about going to the show.  I did, I enjoyed it immensely, and the group became one of the columns supporting my developing fondness for low-fi retro indie rock.  The genre reminds me of the searing, overdriven stride of Weld-era Neil Young and the big blues-rock bands I listened to in college.

Maybe it was a case of high expectations.  Maybe it was my ears; I've been seeing a doctor about wax buildup.  Maybe alcohol, as in not enough of it - the show was sold out and it was crowded enough that if I'd gone to the bar, I wouldn't have been able to get back to the spot where I could see the band well.  I can't blame the venue; even at its worst, the sound is good and the concertgoers are well behaved.

That transcendence, that sudden and radical shift of perspective, is why I go see live music.  It's an epiphany machine.  I get stuck, and I need all the help I can get to see the proverbial forest.  It honestly doesn't matter if the music is atonal classical pieces, or bluegrass, or metal, or something I'd actually choose to put on.  It's allowing myself to be carried along with it that sheds all my assumptions and preconcieved notions, showing me the world fresh, as if after a spring rain.  Or maybe it's just vibrating my synapses loose.

I'll keep trying.

Humor impaired

"Been watching Game of Thrones and I think I've figured out why people like it.  It's a medieval fantasy with office politics but they get to stab annoying coworkers."

I posted the above as a Facebook status update because I thought it was funny (after all I amuse myself better than anyone else does).  But then it occurred to me that posting the phrase 'stab annoying coworkers' on a public site might have unintended consequences.  So I deleted it.

I'm posting it here, where I can crack a joke while making it clear that I don't intend to actually perforate anyone.  Here, I can provide context, because I can write more than two sentences without people's eyes glazing over.  I hope.

In a world where an eight-year-old can be suspended for pointing a chicken finger at someone and saying the word "bang", discretion is the better part of comedy.

Trying on some alternatives to Google Reader

As I posted recently, Google is killing off Reader on July 1.  Having moved past denial, anger, and bargaining, I am now sadly seeking another feedreader.  Here are the two halves of the solution:

1. I need a front end that shows me the contents of the blog posts - preferably on both a computer and on my phone
2. I need an online database of what feeds I've subscribed to and what stories I've read

The second point is important because to date, many alternatives to Reader (to name just one example, Newsrob which I used for a while) provided custom front ends but behind the scenes they synced with Reader's database rather than maintaining their own.  That approach will soon stop working.

I began with the Lifehacker article where I first heard about it.  A desktop app would be cumbersome for me, so I started with the four online services they named:  Netvibes, Feedly, Newsblur, and The Old Reader.  Here are my first impressions:

• Newsblur has a nice look and feel, and it has the functionality I'm looking for.  It also has some nice spiffs (scroll down to "the next three months") such as the ability to "learn" and afterwards filter or prioritize posts for you.  It's a one-man operation staggering under the load of something like 30X growth in one week, so it's throwing a lot of errors right now.  The free version is limited but I'm willing to pay the $24 a year if it stabilizes.
• Feedly came highly recommended (to be precise, by 65% of respondents to a Lifehacker poll).  But for some reason they require users to install a browser plugin (see below).  I was a bit put off by such a brash request, but I went along with it.  Then I discovered that you cannot create a Feedly account without providing login credentials to either Facebook or Google.  You can't just make up a new username and password and be anonymous.  Maybe I'm paranoid but allowing a company to see everything in my web browser and have access to my Facebook or Google account made me fear I might be leaving myself open to identity theft.  Not necessarily from Feedly, but maybe from somebody who hacks them, or buys them.

• Netvibes appears to be oriented towards social media professionals, that is, marketers.  What they call a "basic" account is free; they charge for things like analytics for brand management.  This is a very nice feedreader considering that it's built for people who read for very different purposes than I do.  I suppose I shouldn't be surprised it's good, since marketing people actually get paid to read the internet all day.
• The Old Reader was actually patterned after a previous design of Google Reader.  You might recall the teething pains of the last few years as Google rolled out its "MOAR WHITE" look-and-feel.  The implementation of that look on Reader was particularly ugly and difficult to use, so some folks coded up a new site that looked like, well, the old Reader.  When Google stripped the "sharing" functionality out of Reader a year and a half ago, The Old Reader retained it.  Encouraged, I went to the site to create an account, only to discover that they too demanded that I log in either with Facebook or Google credentials.  Since I already had two good alternatives at that point, I declined to open my kimono to another stranger.

Reader's death sentence has created a power vacuum, and some growth-minded dotcoms are stepping in.  Digg has announced they're working on a reader, so I've filed that away to keep track of.  If you want to read more, the Google Reader tag on Lifehacker has been busy.  You can also visit the Google Reader Users community on Google+.  In fact, there is so much being said about the passing of Reader that I'm confident you could spend the next three months reading it all and not have any time left over to actually do anything about it.

other ways to have fun with photoshop

This Is Bullshit

Since you're reading this, there's a fairly strong chance you've already heard that yesterday Google announced the imminent demise of Google Reader.  (The upshot:  sorry you're SOL.)  Reader is the most popular service for subscribing to RSS feeds, which is how most of us bloggers keep track of each others' posts.  If it weren't for RSS, we'd have to subscribe to blogs via email - or, worse, visit every site every day to check for new posts.

This is bullshit.

Google, here are some thoughts going through my mind:

• How do you build an utterly dominant tool, crush the competition, and then abandon it?
• Are you trying to obsolesce the underlying technology, RSS?  If so, in the name of Faraday, Einstein, Tesla, Edison, and Newton, why?
• How do you keep supporting Blogger but take away the network that links bloggers together?
• How do you fail to provide a migration path to a new service, like, say, Google+?  Surely you have someplace you'd like to have our eyeballs.
• Were you not making enough money from ads on Reader?  Is that it?  If so, couldn't you have bothered to try pushing a few more ads to support a team to maintain it?

I have 323 subscriptions in Reader.  I use it not only for reading blogs but also for comment threads on blogs, and for totally unbloggy things like local Groupons, tour dates for bands, new Meetup activity, jeez, the list goes on forever.  I probably spend as much time on Reader as the average american spends watching TV.

Yeah, there are some people talking about alternatives (most of whose sites are currently down under what amounts to a DOS attack from tens of millions of techies freaking out) and gamely stocking their digital fallout shelters.  But I'm pissed.  You know what?  Outlook has an RSS reader.  There's probably a way to get a list of feeds in Outlook to sync between two computers and a phone.  Fuck you Google, I'm going to Microsoft.

There's nothing like righteous indignation to wake a slumbering blog, eh?