Practicalmadness

First, a little history: the CTA decided last month to try creating a “new” train line by bridging the Cermak branch of the Blue Line with the Lake Street branch of the Green Line via the Paulina Connector. And they announced that they would be holding a “Name the Line” essay contest for area schoolchildren to pick the new route’s color.

The current lines (for you non-Chicagoans) are Red, Blue, Brown, Green, Orange, Purple and Yellow. The initial news reports of the “new” line suggested its color might be Silver, which would have been a worthy addition. And I thought “Bronze Line” had a nice ring to it.

But neither I nor the Chicago Tribune are area students, grades K-8, and it is not our place to decide what the new color should be — the children alone enjoy the privilege to nominate names via their essays, and the winning child alone bears responsibility for whether Chicago thinks their suggested name is sweet or so, so, sour.

And now that the winning name has been selected, it is that child West Side residents should be thinking of when they hear the robot voice tell them they’re riding a Pink Line train to work every morning.

Pink was chosen over Gold and Silver, and I have strong feelings about both of those colors. I think Silver Line would be a bitchin’ name, for example, and (now that the new Yeah Yeah Yeahs album is out) singing “Gold Line’s gonna tell me where the light is…!” would amuse me for all of ten minutes.

The Tribune reports that many children chose pink, so there isn’t (yet) a story about why a Pink Line would be at all relevant to the city or neighborhood, about what pink means to the winning child, anything like that. What we do have to justify it is this:

“Pink clearly works,” CTA President Frank Kruesi said. “What was really exciting to the board members, and also a lot of people writing the essays, is that it brings a smile to people’s faces. That’s not bad as a start for someone hopping on a train.”

Well, gee — if making people smile is the best justification for a color choice, I’d like to suggest to the CTA board that we re-color the existing lines while we’re at it. For example, why on earth should I take the Blue Line to work, when I could be traveling on the Periwinkle Line? And maybe the trip from downtown to Evanston would be less irritating if one were spending an hour on the Lavender Line before changing to a Mauve Line train at Howard, don’t you think?

• I finally found and bought the new Linksys CIT200 Skype phone, a cordless handset that connects to any Windows PC and hooks up to Skype’s P2P telephony network to provide cheap calls to any phone in the world, and free calls to any fellow Skype user.

  The call quality is decent, about the same as a cell phone. But for me the killer Skype feature is the price: calls to most telephone numbers in the First World are $0.02/minute, prepaid, and calls to other Skype members are always free. You can reload your account online using your credit card or a PayPal account, and every now and then PayPal or Skype will offer free promotional minutes. The ability to receive normal phonecalls (called SkypeIn) costs about $4/month and includes free voicemail.

  Unlike other internet phone services like Vonage, Skype calls are routed via other users’ connections (fun fact: the creators of Skype also created KaZaa) and this particular handset requires a PC with the Skype software installed. One can make Skype calls from their computer using a headset or microphone and save the cost of the handset, but that makes it difficult to use Skype to call for pizza while you’re crashed on the couch.

• Apple just released a software update for the 5G and Nano iPods that allows you to set a personal volume limit. Smart people have said that limiting one’s headphone listening to no more than 60% volume and no more than 60 minutes per sitting helps prevent your eardrums from being liquefied, but that iPod touch wheel is a slippery bastard. The sixty minute limit is up to you, but at least this will help you help yourself in the volume department.

• The Equator CD 400 is a tiny dishwasher about the same size as a large microwave oven, large enough to wash about four place settings’ worth of dishes, glassware and utensils in about 45 minutes.

• Griffin has announced the new iTalkPro, a successor to their audio recording iPod accessory now compatible with the 5th generation (video) iPods. The old iPods could record audio with the help of microphone add-ons from Griffin or Belkin, but were limited to 8 kHz, mono WAV files that were only barely usable for voice memos. The new iPods, however, can record at full CD quality. The iTalkPro (which currently has neither a price nor a release date) is the first announced product that enables the new hi-fi recording feature.

Ruby on Rails version 1.1, a rather lovely upgrade to your humble narrator’s favorite web framework, just released today. Big ups to the Rails core team and everyone in the community who contributed to the release.

To everyone building a Rails app right now, your lives just got a whole lot cooler. I used one of the biggest new Rails 1.1 features, RJS templates, in this year’s Oscars Game for the “live” scoreboard/winners display on Oscar Night, and we’re relying heavily on the new polymorphic associations for a client project we’re working on at Killswitch Collective.

The announcement at the Rails blog describes all the delicious new features and improvements, and a post by Rails creator David Heinemeier Hansson on 37signals’s Signal vs. Noise blog explains the ancestry of some Rails 1.1 features that were extracted from recent/upcoming 37s products.

And elsewhere on the web:

• 37signals developer and Rails Core member Jamis Buck explains the new respond_to feature, which does for web service APIs what Rails 0.11 did for Ajax — it makes adding an API almost as easy as not to.

• Mike Clark describes some lesser-known features and improvements in Rails 1.1

• Dan Benjamin, who wrote — IMHO — the very best tutorial for getting Rails running on Mac OS X Tiger, has a follow-up today on updating your Rails to 1.1 on Mac OS X.

• DreamHost botched their upgrade to Rails 1.1 and had to roll back to version 1.0 while they work out the kinks. D’oh!

• But what the kids really wanna know is: is it faster? Stefan Kaes has the facts and he’s voting yes: Rails 1.1 is up to 11% faster under certain circumstances.

• Speaking of that fine Mike Clark fellow, he’s back with an introduction to Running Your Rails App Headless. See, in 1.1 they’ve not only added the new Integration Testing framework, they’ve exposed it to script/console, for easier and more powerful poking and prodding. Very cool.

The Sun-Times tells us that Harold’s Chicken Shack is opening a location in Wicker Park later this month, and I predict that yuppies, hipsters, trixies and other assorted white folks from throughout the Near North Side will be flocking to the new store to try out Harolds’ legendary fried chicken.

Specifically, they’ll be going to this one store out of the 50+ Harold’s Chicken Shacks throughout Chicago. Why? Because it’s the only one on the North Side. People not familiar with Chicago’s racial geography may be wondering why, with so many Harold’s stores strewn throughout the city, it’s such a big deal that they’re opening up for business anywhere north of Roosevelt Road, let alone in a hot hipster neighborhood like Wicker Park.

Let us begin our examination with a brief quotation from the Wikipedia entry for Harold’s:

The character of Harold’s developed primarily out of necessity. Harold Pierce, a black Chicago entrepreneur, founded the restaurant in the 1950s because the newly spreading larger fast food chains avoided African-American neighborhoods. In turn, Chicago’s legal and social obstacles to black-owned businesses prevented Harold’s from expanding into downtown or the North Side. Harold’s became one of the few examples of a thriving fast food chain that was owned by and primarily served the black community.

Harold’s is a black thing, but more importantly, it’s a South Side thing. On the North Side of Chicago, having few choices for cheap eats means only having a McDonald’s, a Dunkin’ Donuts and usually a Starbucks. In Wicker Park near Milwaukee Avenue, where the new Harold’s is opening up, there are dozens of sandwich shops, taco stands and coffeehouses.

When I worked at Starbucks one of our nerdy white managers from the North Side was hanging around with one of our black baristas from the South Side, and this guy was asking this girl to take him to Harold’s some time. That’s because for this kid to go into a Harold’s on the South Side and order some chicken just seemed a little inappropriate and awkward. There’s an invisible boundary between the white and black neighborhoods, between the North Side and South Side, that is simply not crossed for something as petty as chicken.

And yet for some people on the North Side, Harold’s Chicken is like something out of myth: on the South Side they have these places that make the best fried chicken on the planet, and they’re everywhere. And it’s also something that’s distinctly Chicagoan, but not a Chicago cliché like deep dish pizza you have to eat with a knife and fork, or hot dogs with a whole garden salad on them.

And of course, it’s a way for me to demonstrate my own lack of assimilation into the whole Chicago thing. You see, even after seven years in this town, I still order my hot dogs ‘ketchup only’ and I still appreciate a good thin crust pizza. Harold’s Chicken is meant to be eaten slathered in hot sauce, but you can be sure that I’ll be the jerk in line who wants the sauce on the side or not at all.

Update: Gapers Block reports that the April 2 opening date originally cited in this post was a flight of fancy on the part of the Chicago Sun-Times.

I’m known for my love of novelty sodas. For my birthday in December, my girlfriend gave me the Jones Soda Holiday Pack, though it could be argued that the gift wasn’t even so much the sodas but the great time we all had being disgusted by them.

When my friend James came up from St. Louis for the Oscars party weekend before last, she brought a six pack of novelty sodas. There were some old-timey regional varieties like Moxie and Cheerwine the latter of which is a childhood favorite from its tenure in certain Alabama supermarkets. There’s Cricket Cola, a green tea-infused soda I drink whenever I pick up a sandwich from Potbelly. And there’s some crazy banana and espresso sodas to round out the pack. I’m like, score, dude.

Anytime there’s a crazy new beverage on the market, I’m the first one in line to try it. When Pepsi Blue was announced in 2002, I was at 7-Eleven every day (alas, seriously, I was) so I could see what blueberry-flavored cola was like. Same thing with Dr. Pepper Red Fusion, Vanilla Coke, Coke C2, dnL, Mountain Dew MDX — the list goes on. I even actively sought out the Budweiser energy drink B^E so I could sample it.

So when I just learned today that Coca-Cola is coming out with a new coffee-flavored cola, called Coca-Cola Blak, I got a little excited. It’s not that I believe a coffee-flavored Coke is going to be successful. In fact I assume that these sodas will fail, and feel that trying them is a way of getting in on something no one else knows about — sort of like an early ticket to a new exhibit in the museum of corporate marketing blunders.

And there’s something exciting about an idea so terrifically bad as Pepsi Blue or B^E. Budweiser by itself is bland, commodified Americana, so to see Anheuser-Busch put out a ginseng- and taurine-infused beer in a Red Bull can is like the branding equivalent to heroin chic. It’s sexy because it’s been ruined.

Everything’s Going To Be Indie Rock

In my Wikipedia research into the annals of failed beverages, I stumbled onto something I hadn’t previously ever heard of: OK Soda, a failed 1994 attempt by Coca-Cola to market an “alternative” soda to slackers, hipsters and other attractively edgy folks aged 18-35. To quote Wikipedia:

International market research done by The Coca-Cola Company in the late 1980s revealed that “Coke” was the second most recognizable word across all languages in the world. The first word was “OK.” [Coca-Cola Company marketing chief Sergio Zyman] decided to take advantage of this existing brand potential and created a soda with this name. He conceived of a counter-intuitive advertising campaign that intentionally targeted people who didn’t like advertising. He predicted that the soda would be a huge success, and promised Goizueta that the soda would take at least 4% of the US beverage market.

OK (which is also pig latin for Coke — “oke-cay”) was test-marketed in about twelve cities (including Austin, Boston, Portland and Seattle) for about seven months before it became apparent that the nation was simply not ready to countenance an alternative soda marketed by a massive corporation, unless of course the soda were tasty, which by all accounts it was not.

The thing that struck me about OK was that the marketing was seriously ahead of its time. The cans (one of which is pictured at right) featured art by Daniel Clowes and Charles Burns and exactly the sort of bold graphic design that’s in style right now. The ad campaign (slogan: “Everything is going to be OK”) included an 800-number that connected to a voicemail box, and people could leave messages with the understanding that they might be included in an OK Soda commercial — which strikes me as a slightly creepier version of the photos on the Jones Soda bottles, or like Post Secret adapted to audio and made to service a brand.

One such message that was included in an ad:

Ah, this is Pam H. from Newton, Massachusetts, and I resent you saying that everything is going to be O.K. You don’t know anything about my life. You don’t know what I’ve been through in the last month. I really resent it. I’m tired of you people trying to tell me things that you don’t have any idea about. I resent it. ((Click!))

Would this product have been successful today? Well, maybe — the marketing would generate some buzz, but nothing would change the two facts that did it in in ‘94: nobody wants the Coca-Cola Company to pander to their slacker-ness, and nobody wants a soda that isn’t tasty. (Except me, but I hope it’s been well-established in these pages that I am crazy.)

The last update to this Practicalmadness weblog was on March 7. Now, I’m no time expert, but it would appear to me that today is March 23 — which is a date more than two weeks after March 7. My hypothesis, which of course has yet to be fully formed or completely tested, is that it has been more than two weeks since this web site was last updated. However, more study is needed before we can say that with any certainty. After all, I don’t think anyone predicted the breach of the levees.

So what’s up, blog? I’ll tell you something that’s new with me: I will be speaking at the First-Ever International Rails Conference, to be held here in Chicago during the weekend of June 25.

My talk, titled “Meanwhile, In The Rest of the World…”, will be about designing web applications for a general audience, and avoiding certain assumptions one makes when you assume that everyone on the planet knows how to use del.icio.us-style “tags” just because you and your nerdy friends do. My audience will be up to 500 Ruby on Rails developers, and after I offend and insult them with my half-baked ideas about the user experience, you will find me carrying the Practicalmadness banner and fighting for truth, justice and the American way — in the hotel bar.

Meanwhile, on the rest of the internets:

• Some guy attended ShoWest and blogged about seeing the new Pixar movie Cars. And I’m glad to see Pixar is continuing their grand tradition of recruiting voice talent from public radio: we can look forward to hearing the Car Talk guys playing the talking race car protagonist’s sponsors in Cars. (As for me, I’m sorry, but they lost me at talking race cars. Even if they do look like Micro Machines.)

• The headline of the day on Newsvine: Doherty Pleads Guilty Then Kicks Reporter. We refer here, of course, to Brit rocker Pete Doherty, who you may remember was a supporting character in the Kate Moss cocaine scandal last year, and who reportedly did heroin and crack cocaine during a recent interview with Rolling Stone.

You may have noticed that I’m doing a lot of Wikipedia linking of late. I am, in fact, doing a lot of Wikipedia reading of late, because I can’t think of any other website that is as likely as Wikipedia to have content about Micro Machines, Crystal Pepsi and the political structure of the Iranian government, or whatever other thing I happen to be interested in this hour. This should not be taken as an endorsement of Wikipedia’s accuracy, its mission or even of wikis in general. This should instead be understood by you, Reader, as an acknowledgement that any website with such a plethora of obscure pop culture nonsense is a website that I will read and enjoy.

Yes, I know — it’s another ‘miscellany’ post. I’m not sufficiently exercised about anything this morning to spend a few hundred words dissing or praising it, but I did want to mention a couple bits of awesome:

• OMFG The Legend of Zelda turned 20 last month. And I still have never finished it. I’m just, um, waiting for it to come out on video-game iPod. Which means, of course, that I’ll have to wait for there to be a video-game iPod.

• Ain’t It Cool News contributor Drew McWeeny (aka Moriarty) just reviewed the Battlestar Galactica: Season 2.0 DVD set on his blog and articulated rather well the reasons why it’s possibly The Best Show on Television:

  I would call this the first great post-9/11 television show. I know RESCUE ME (a show I admire in its own right) deals overtly with life in the shadow of 9/11, but sometimes, it’s better when you don’t deal with something head-on. GALACTICA uses the remove of science-fiction to pose real ethical questions about the way we live now. No matter what culture you’re part of at the moment, no matter what country you live in, no matter what your background is, there’s a sense right now that we are in the last moments of the countdown clock, that things are going to get worse before they get better… if they get better. It’s like we’ve got survivor’s guilt on a global scale, and this show taps that fear in a very real and potent fashion.

• Just out in record shops, megastores and iTunes Music Emporia: Neko Case’s Fox Confessor Brings The Flood. (It’s also available on everyone’s favorite cheap-ass indie-rock download service, eMusic.) So far I’m not loving it as much as Blacklisted, which should not be taken as a bad thing — Fox Confessor is a different beast and will probably take some listens to fully get into. (I haven’t really gotten into The Life Pursuit yet for pretty much the same reason.)

• MSNBC reports on a new computer model that sex is less about genetic diversity, and more about isolating “harmful mutations into individual organisms so they could be easily weeded out by natural selection.” Which sounds sort of like trickle-down economics. But for sex.

• I’m brewing a longer piece reviewing up some new web apps I’m liking: StikiPad is a nice little hosted wiki service that I’m probably going to use for the Friendly PHP documentation. Newsvine is an extremely ambitious attempt to combine citizen journalism (as in blogs), community-moderated links (as in Slashdot or Digg) and wire news (as in the Associated Press) into a one-stop shop for all things news. And Ma.gnolia is like del.icio.us, but prettier and more sodden with features (like TinyURL-style link shortening and star ratings).

• Here are some photos from this weekend’s Oscar Night party at my house.

Congratulations to “Tony,” winner of the 2006 Oscars Game with a dominating 612 points. Tony wins a 512 MB iPod shuffle and a custom Oscars Game t-shirt. Coming in second place was Andy Lund with 570 points, followed by Cheryly Syta with 540 points. Andy and Cheryly receive free stuff from the iTunes Music Store. Winners will be officially notified by e-mail Monday afternoon.

As for me, I came in at 18th place with 440 points, due in part to my abusing the new multiple pick sets feature — the winners’ superb performance was partly due to having made really good picks for the most difficult categories (documentaries and short films) and, in Tony’s case, having only one pick set so that s/he didn’t have to pay what I’m now calling the “pick set tax.” Final aggregate scores are divided by the number of pick sets you’ve created, so I managed to bleed 10-20 points on each category while Tony got to keep all the points (up to 36) for each correct pick.

I’m eager to get some feedback from users about the pick sets feature, and it certainly made the game more interesting. Part of my intention in adding multiple picks was to reward certainty: if you’re confident in your predictions then you only need one set. I was less confident, created three sets, and lost.

On the one hand I could say that I made riskier picks than I otherwise would have, and maybe if I’d had to limit myself to a single pick set I’d have been more thoughtful in my selections. On the other hand, I could consider myself lucky I got points at all for some of my selections. If I picked “Good Night, and Good Luck” for Cinematography in one set over the ASC Award winner “Memoirs of a Geisha,” I should have realized I was essentially throwing away ten points. And there were a lot of categories where I hedged and simply did not need to hedge.

As for the Oscar show itself: I say meh. The Daily Show “campaign ads” for the various categories (narrated by Stephen Colbert) were a highlight, but Jon Stewart’s performance as host was (as I said many times last evening) “Ellen-caliber,” though not nearly as bad as Letterman. The opening sequence was pretty funny, and he got a couple of good jokes in, but mostly it was all as lame and tired as, well, the Oscars. I guess we can’t have Chris Rock every year.

And the elephant in the middle of the room, “Crash” winning Best Picture? I’m shocked a little, disappointed a little and indifferent a lot. Not being in Hollywood, I can’t say whether this represents some vast right-wing conspiracy to back away from the Big Gay Cowboy Movie, a bunch of L.A. provincialism (hey look! It’s yet another movie about our town!) or what — if I got to pick I’d have picked “Capote” or “Good Night, and Good Luck,” so whatever, Hollywood.

Yeah, you heard that right: Oscar Night approacheth, and tho you better mothey over to the Othcarth Game— ahem, sorry, I mean, mosey on over to the Oscars Game and make those last-minute picks. You’ve got until 5 PM on Sunday to make your predictions, after which time the ability to make or edit picks will be locked and the site will start looking a little something like the screenshot at right. (Actually, it’ll look a larger something— you get the idea.)

I can’t really say that going all Ajax on you for the Oscar Night version of the game offers much value over just refreshing the page every 30 seconds, but what the hell — it’s been fun to work on so far, such that I really won’t mind when some of the serious competitors we’ve got this year kick my ass and take my free iPod.

For those friends, well-wishers and game-playing smack-talkers who won’t be able to make it to the invitation-only Practicalmadness Oscar Night viewing party on Sunday, we’ll have a chat room (powered by Campfire) where up to 20 people can get together and celebrate the fact that they’re…in a chat room. Or something. Whatever, we’ll have a chat room. Woooo-hoo!

John Gruber (of Joyent and Daring Fireball fame) just posted to his company’s Joyeur blog about how Public Betas Are A Sham. And now I’m engaged in a lovely comments thread argument with “Boris” that I just wanted to share with you:

BORIS
We are going to be in beta for quite a while near the end of march. The good part about the web is that you actually have the freedom to stay in beta as long as you wish. If you develop hardware or produce printed media you know how incredibly frustrating it is to finally see your finished product and then finding a small error, misprint or bug. On the web, your product is never finished. On the web, every day is beta day. Long live the web, long live the beta!

DAVID
Boris: I think Gruber’s trying to say that what you’re describing is a bad thing. True, a perpetual beta is great for developers, but it’s terrible for customers since you’re basically asking them to pony up cash (or to look at ads) for something you don’t consider “done” enough to remove the beta label. ‘Beta’ is a way of ducking responsibility.

BORIS
David: That might be what he means (and I understand) but it’s not what he writes (and others might understand). True: asking cash for something that isn’t finished isn’t cool. But my point would be that there is no ‘Finished’ on the web anymore. Therefore the term ‘Beta’ isn’t that bad after all.

And it’s at this point that I whip out the trusty word counter and open a can of epic-length on his ass:

It’s true, there is no “finished” on the web — there never was any such thing as a “finished” website. There is, however, such a thing as being “done” enough for the general public, which for me means a couple of things:

• Basic features are present and accounted for. The more ambitious the app, the longer this list will be, but “shipping” software isn’t missing anything really important. That’s not to say that it has everything it should or could have, just the minimum list of features needed for people to get into using it.

• Those features been tested and found to work consistently on current release versions of the Big Three browsers. (And you know what? A lack of Safari support needn’t be a deal-breaker, so long as it’s forthcoming. Us Mac users know where to find Firefox if your app is useful enough.)

• The site is open for business. Signups (if needed) are being taken, and invite codes are only required if the normal, intended function of the app requires them.

• The site scales so that whoever wants to use it can use it most of the time.

• There’s a help page, a contact form or just some resource to help new users get acclimated.

There is no such thing as ‘finished’ on the web, and there never was. Forgive me for saying so, but duh — we all already knew that. “Shipping” or “beta” are descriptors not of the state of the software (which will change constantly) but of the developers’ confidence that it’s ready for visitors. It’s a state of mind, not a technological fact. The technological fact is that the difference between a ‘beta’ site and a ‘shipping’ one is often invisible to the end user, except that calling something ‘beta’ sets the expectation that it might break and calling something ‘shipping’ or ‘version 1.0’ sets the expectation that it might break but not as much.

Shipping means a product has been tested and found to be generally reliable. Shipping means it’s supported by its maker to whatever extent they choose to support it. Shipping means accountability — not necessarily in a practical sense, but definitely in terms of reputation. Shipping means you can ask for the consumer’s confidence that your product is good.

Beta is the absence of those things. Beta is not something to be aspired to — it’s a temporary state that should last as briefly as possible. Of course websites evolve, of course there’s no such thing as finishing a website and having done with it. We all know that, and I’d assume your customers know that.