Brian Kerr

(Disclaimers: I’ve read all of the books except the stupid werewolf one, and I’m not the world’s biggest fan, but I do live with her. I am not participating in the prediction market.)

Inkling prediction market: Will Harry Potter be alive at the end of the last book of the series? At this writing, it’s trading at $83.81 — that is, an 84% chance that the Boy Who Lived will, you know, live. Here’s a one-week graph (a new Inkling feature):

Do watch this market for any changes in the next few days, although it’s been trading above $70 since May. I’ll go on record with my personal end of Harry Potter prediction here. Basically the little fucker is going to Live and propagate and everybody will exist happily ever after. No SWAT teams, no sniping of hippogriffs, no invisible thestrals biting through night-vision goggles and bullet-proof jackets for a taste of flesh. No squibs with megaphones versus hucksters, shamans, preachers with polycarbonate riot shields. No rocket summer over Hogwarts or Weasley Bros. magicked jellybean radiation-sickness cure or Fortean eruption of giants walking the earth, serpents and great whales swimming beneath it, nocturnal lights flying over it. The whole Dark Lord Trying to Destroy All That is Kind and Good and Cute situation will be neatly resolved, perhaps with a little bloodshed of certain useless tertiary characters (my pick is Ginny, the redhead being stereotypical Dark Lord fodder in this genre), but entirely without patriot redneck muggle hordes slobbering forth about Harry or Neville or Tom or whomever being the antichrist or the Superman or what have you, because the stupid wizard world takes care of its own — because the real world and the hermetically sealed, dysfunctional, useless wizard world never intersect in any meaningful way — because the series never had integrity enough to break through all that (unlike, say, the “His Dark Materials” ‘kids’ series) — because, ultimately, nothing really is at stake in Harry Potter books, besides the generic novelistic concerns of: will our heroes grow up and propagate the species, and in what specific configurations. In light of all this, I should have started a prediction market long ago to track whether or not the last Harry Potter book will end in the most bankrupt of whimpers: with the actual depiction of, in some horrible flash-forward, Harry’s kids. I’d price that market super low, but it is a dreaded possibility, given the prognosis above. Our Living Boy has a Luke Skywalker early retirement in his future, and the way that gets expressed in this cosmology is that (sit down, grab a tissue, you’ll need it) he gets to sire the family he never had! Even better: we also get to see the various supporting characters in Hogwarts faculty positions — proving that those who can’t, teach.

In summary, the Boy Who Lived will live. Mega bullish on the Harry Potter will be alive at the end of the last book of the series market. He shouldn’t be, if there was any justice he wouldn’t be. But he will, and that market will cash out for you at a cool $100.00.

Locally, you can get your copy of this book at the Shaman Drum Bookshop in Ann Arbor (at the cold, bloodless heart of Art Fair) or The Rocket in Ypsilanti. You can also check it out from the Ann Arbor District Library: “517 holds on first copy returned of 1 copy — 160 copies ordered.” The H. Potter funeral/wedding services will be held this Friday.

(tags: antichrist bloodshed books bullet proof jackets feedback-loop hermetically inkling jellybean little fucker megaphones muggle narratives night vision goggles predictionmarkets psyops radiation sickness riot shields rocket summer serpents squibs swat teams thestrals weasley wizard world)

From the party-like-it's-2000 department:

A couple of the Mac OS X developer previews had a weird purple button at the top right corner of window title bars, where the magical lozenge can be found more recently. This button appeared in a few developer previews, but was removed before the first really crappy public release.

This button was actually a toggle between normal layered windowing and a nasty “single window mode” which allowed only one window to show at a time. Single window mode simply minimized the existing (single) window whenever an action opened up a new window.

For more on this behavior and screen captures of what the button looked like in disabled and enabled states, see John Siracusa’s review of OS X developer preview 3 (start reading around ¶5).

The magical lozenge which occupies the same spot in more recent Mac OSes has two purposes. First, you click it to show or hide the toolbar. The second purpose — and the reason it’s a magical lozenge — you ⌘-click it to cycle between the various icon/text and toolbar size configurations. Like all forms of magic, this one has its downside as well, in that the odd ugly duck application may manage to do something just totally insane when you click the magical lozenge, at least until they fix the thing.

(tags: design feedback-loop interaction mac visual)

Some recent searches that brought people here, with links and commentary as appropriate.

annual film farm ann arbor

Film Farm is an annual student film competition hosted by M-Flicks. This year’s Film Farm X was held last night (Friday, April 6) at the Michigan Theater. Attendees vote for their favorite films in several categories, which are then showered with micro glory.

kabob palace ann arbor

Kabob Palace was a restaurant near U-M campus in downtown Ann Arbor. It closed in February 2007, but the kitchen and service started to fall apart long before that. From about 2001 to 2004, Kabob Palace was my go-to spot for big groups, since there was plenty of seating and friendly service. They made excellent mjaddra, simple and tasty.

oddmuse analytics

OddMuse is a very cool wiki engine with a modular design — a svelte core backed by a bunch of extensions which add particular kinds of features or black magic. If you want to collect analytics for your OddMuse wiki, just use Google Analytics. A bigger problem is making sense of the data you’ve just collected. By setting up clever conversion goals that track progress through your wiki and, in particular, your wiki login / edit / preview / save cycle, you can differentiate between visitors who show up and read versus those who actually make changes.

osx keyboard navigation menubar

Hit ⌃F2 to select the menu bar using a keyboard. You can then press arrow keys to navigate around, and type the names of menus or commands to jump to them. You can remap this keyboard shortcut in the “Keyboard Shortcuts” tab of the Keyboard & Mouse settings in your System Preferences.

If you are a Quicksilver person, another (arguably easier) way to do this is to set up a trigger that looks like this:

and map it to a key combination of your choice.

slicehost jabber

Just do it! One fun use case: if you don’t feel like running mail on a slice, just send status or update messages via jabber.

(tags: annarbor feedback-loop lunch mac movies slicehost wiki)

Here is a poem that you and I and whomever else wrote together by writing and reading this weblog, so why don’t you read it, out loud:

Photos of tulips in snow
by you and me and whomever else

quicksilver cube
ftff
anakin skywalker “you can try”
“paul ford” sitekit
quicksilver cube
frieze building
slicehost
    slicehost
        slicehost
animal crossing keep trees alive
ann arbor aerial photos
left behind at the fishbowl
brian
the possibility love is not enough

Certainly I’m being disingenuous — or at least strategic — with this poem. I made the poem from the most recent search queries that brought people to this weblog, in chronological order as reported by 103bees. But when I did this, I made some poetic decisions. For example, since my poem is a sonnet, I couldn’t include the evocative fifteenth query, which was “photos of tulips in snow.” That’s how it became the poem’s title.

How to be a poet

1. Write things
2. Let others find those things while you go live your life for a bit
3. Decide how long your poem should be — if you are brave, try a sestina, six six-line stanzas and one little three-line appendage at the end
4. Open your whatever analytics software
5. Copy out the right number of lines
6. Punctuate and line-break your poem as needed
7. Title, if desired

Objections

Objection my poem doesn’t rhyme. So what? You wrote, or hinted at, the word lines of your poem in whatever you wrote about in the first place. And the merry brigade of googlers or jeeves-inquirers or what have you related the word lines to each other.

Objection intentionality. :P (alternate: intentionality is a cargo cult.)

Objection there is no demand for my poem. Your poem is a creative + generative activity. By imposing an order and sequence to the word lines in your poem, you can see new relationships between the things you have written about and others have searched for.

(tags: analytics feedback-loop media narratives process web weblogs writing)

Dung beetles only come out on winter evenings — and the Animal Crossing winter ends soon. (If you look, the tree leaves are turning green again, underneath all that snow.) Walk around until you see a snowball rolling around of its own accord. You will observe a tiny dung beetle pushing the snowball. Get out a bug net, nudge the snowball, and catch the dung beetle as it makes its pathetically slow escape. You have one chance, so aim true. Dung beetles sell for 800 bells at the store.

If you really, really want to catch a dung beetle today, there’s a cheap trick. You will always find exactly two snowballs on the ground in your town, and if you destroy a snowball by pushing it into the water or smashing it into a tree or wall or something, it will magically regenerate when you go inside a building and then come back out. So if you had the patience, you could probably do this over and over until you spot a beetle.

Actual dung beetles live on all continents of the globe, minus Antarctica. Here is a fun page for Queensland, Australia farmers on how to attract dung beetles to your cattle ranch, where they earn their keep by eating what they eat.

(tags: animalcrossing feedback-loop)

It’s winter, worst season for fishing in Animal Crossing. If it’s after 4PM and snowing, you may be able to catch a coelecanth in the ocean; it has a huge fish shadow, looks pretty sweet, and nets a cool 15,000 bells at sale. If your huge fish shadow is not a coelacanth, it’s going to be a tuna, which is not a bad deal either.

This may be a placebo effect, but Nathan and I had decided that there seems to be better fish when you’re visiting over wifi.

Update 2007 1 30: one Flickr’d coelecanth for your pleasure (via acww Flickr tag).

(tags: animalcrossing feedback-loop)

Donald Rumsfeld sez: “we fight with the Finder we have, not the Finder we want to have.”

Finder is the OS X file manager. It is essentially useless. Grievances against the Finder range from the aesthetic (brushed metal; ugly colored labels) to its oddball interaction design (modal icon, list, or column views; unsound importance of the oval toolbar button) to technical (lack of recovery from a disconnected network share; .DS_Store file pollution). This is just a random sampling; any Mac person will have his or her own list of questionable Finder behaviors.

Over the last few releases of OS X, Finder has changed, but it hasn’t improved: hence FTFF, a slogan coined at Ars Technica.

If you don’t want to wait for Apple to fix the Finder, there are some alternatives (from best to worst):

• muCommander — an excellent open source Norton Commander style file manager, cross-platform yet reasonably Mac-like;
• Liquifile — a clean zooming interface that works best with deeply hierarchical directory structures ($10 USD);
• Learn bash;
• Finder, with icons arranged in a sine wave; or
• Path Finder — a bulky, overcomplicated proprietary Finder clone, not recommended ($35 USD).

For everyday work, I use Finder in column view, with four columns and a floating information palette (⌥⌘I) as the “fifth column.” For anything more complicated, find and xargs are starting points.

(tags: design feedback-loop mac)