Nick Ryberg

5/31/01

While Tim is otherwise occupied with pressing, one might even say moving, concerns, he's allowing me the privilege of once again gracing his pages with my usually less than profound thoughts. With that typically Minnesotan false modesty, I'll move on.

To help separate our particular styles, I take the liberty of aligning my text left.

Since I'm typing this prose in the oldest of Unix editors (well, at least one of the most popular), I'll ramble about my personal feelings on what a good text editor should have.

Now, I am without shame, a diehard Microsoft fan. I know that they are reprehensible in many different ways, but you've got to admit that the equally ubiquitous Window's text editor, Notepad, is one of the few things that they've gotten right. It's simple, direct and gets the job done. It has no fancy frills, you can easily cut and paste <flamesuit>I'm sure you can do this as well in vi, I just haven't had the pleasure of learning that particular key combination...</flamesuit> and it never crashes. What's to crash? No connections to other programs, networks or much of anything for that matter. You can have multiple copies running without sucking megabytes of memory. And, quite frankly, it was written after the arrow and editing keys were common on every pc keyboard!

Now, on the other hand, I can see the appeal of vi. It's equally small footprint, profoundly powerful features and a base of hardcore users that makes Grateful Dead fans look like fair-weather (read MN Twins) fans. It's compliable (a somewhat dubious honor if your idea of compilation involves a garbage heap for the garden), it's modifiable, and like every other *nix based editor extendable and connectable. Let's just cut to the chase Harry - it's a mighty -able tool. But dammit - I'm still learning key combinations! I gave that up with WordPerfect.

5/18/01

Tastes of music.

There are some days when a little techno-trance is just the ticket.  It's sufficiently musical to dampen that part of my brain that gets severely dried out during work.  This is true both of physical and mental labor. There seems to be a department in my psyche that must have a beat going, and if it doesn't, it gets bored and then all hell breaks loose.  My productivity drops, attention span zeroes out, and I actually start to go to sleep in extreme situations.  This is never worse than during meetings, and especially that particularly virulent strain of work get-together that involves sitting around listening to what other (boring) people have to say about what they do (even more boring) ad nauseum.  

It doesn't particularly matter what sort of music it really is.  Anything with the minor exception of Christian-anything will get me going - country (the older the better), jazz (ditto), punk, ska, classic and modern rock, bad commercial music (love the '80's) and some classical all are open fare for my insatiable need to dip the tune stick into someone else's twelve bar blues, rock steady or walz.  To quote Cole Porter, "Do I care?  Oh, no, I do not."

So here I am, large headphones dripping some relatively livable quasi-real electronic dub junk into that special sweet spot in the center of my skull, and I'm a happy camper.  As I work in a heavily steel encrusted building in the middle of the suburbs, my radio reception borders on the very definition of the word null.  If you're a DBA and need a good visual on this, imagine me sitting next to an old, tube driven radio, ear pressed to the wood panelled speaker, straining to hear the sounds of anything, oh anything. That's a null.  

With the joy of internet access at work (no really, it is really, really work related), I have the unbelievable fortune to have access to the majority of the internet radio stations and broadcasters.  With the unfortunate fallout of the advertising royalties contract http://radio.about.com/tvradio/radio/library/weekly/aa050601a.htm killing the vast majority of commercial stations online, I'm restricted to college radio stations for the most part.  This isn't a bad thing by any stretch of the imagination - I'm now a faithful Minnesota follower of http://kzsu.stanford.edu/, a Stanford radio station. With these types of stations, variety is not only the spice of life, but the bread, butter and pasta too...

5/9/01

In the footsteps of Johnny Carson.

When Joan Rivers tottered onto the NBC Burbank sound stage in her high heels, I imagine that she felt a little of the same feelings that I'm now entertaining, so to speak.

So with that thought in mind, I'm venturing into the world of web publishing on a the tails of the ever productive Tim Holtan.  With his gracious consent, I'll be playing the temporary host to your written reality for these short paragraphs.  I can only hope that I go on to the Jay Leno class of show host - complete with a warehouse of vintage motorcycles and cars.  

A little background is in order -- Tim and I have an on-and-off again history that dates back to high school in 1983.  In those days, we were playing with technology as it applied to sound and recording.  Together with the budding engineer Barry Watson, we learned the value of Nakamichi microphones, Teac tape recorders (reel to reel!), and carefully coiled mic cables as we played mobile sound studio to some truly awful garage bands.  There was something awe inspiring about holding a $150 microphone in your hands - sort of the "geez, what can I do with this now" which was always followed by an embarrassed "ahem, a testing, one, two, three..." with eyes downcast.  

Now we're on an entirely different though parallel plane of communication. Our music is limited to abundant collections of MP3's, but we're now in the business of spreading the joy in a text format.  I love the circular nature of technology.  Think of all of cables, routers, switches, satellites and firewalls that this humble text had to make it through to grace your eyes, and yet the information isn't a heck of a lot different from scribbles written on a badly beaten yet beloved notebook (complete with coffee stains on the cover).

Hopefully, my rants will come up to the high standard that Mr. Holtan has set, so till the next time...