The Consumerist asks what is the grade of Taco Bell meat? . Why are we even asking this? Is this a Zen kōan ? What is the sound of one hand performing the Heimlich maneuver?

For what it's worth, I have been told that the boxes of Taco Bell meat are marked "Suitable for human consumption."

I love reading Scott Adams' blog. About every 5-10 posts he has one that is a totally creative and somewhat crazy idea or way of thinking about the world, which actually makes a ton of sense. And he recently referenced the Half Bakery, which looks like it's been up for many years now giving people a place to post just such half-baked ideas.

Some of my favorites:

1. Custard-Filled Speed Bumps (of course by "custard" he means a dilatant substance, such as a corn starch and water slurry)
   
2. Ball Dogs - Next time Wimbledon is about to be held, organise 4 or 5 of the sort of dogs who are insanely obsessed with retrieving balls to fill in for the ball boys/girls.
3. 30 cat night - a more granular scale than the famous 3 dog night.

With my new 30 minute commute (each way!) I've finally discovered the value of podcasts. On advice of one of my fellow bloggers who has been conspicuously silent as of late, I added the Stanford Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders lecture series to my subscriptions.

The first one I listened to today is using film to try to drive social change. They're telling the story of shamans in Zimbabwe who are spreading the meme that raping a virgin girl will cure AIDS--which of course does not. Rather, it psychologically and (perhaps even physically) scars the girl, and quite likely also gives her AIDS. Horrible, horrible, horrible.

Can't wait to hear the one released today from Sue Decker on the Evolution of Yahoo!. As an ex Yahoo!, it's pretty sad to see the company foundering so bad for what I believe is lack of solid, visionary leadership.

Overall, the iPhone is great. I love the integrated maps, along with the location triangulation (though the interaction can be a bit wonky sometimes trying to get it to auto-fill "current location" in the address field). I also wish it had a simple "step through the details of this route" feature so I didn't have to zoom in and scroll around while driving.

I've gotten used to checking my email from anywhere, though I've thus far resisted actually sending or replying to mail. Text entry on the iPhone is merely adequate.

The web browser is pretty nice, and the seamless transition between WiFi and Edge networks make it enjoyable to use. I don't have to think about connectivity at all. It's always available. Some is just faster than others.

I also have a longer commute these days (30-40 minutes each way) as we are temporarily crashing at another company while our new office space is renovated. The iTunes Podcast subscriptions are great. Really easy to set up and use. Though again there are some design details I'd like, such as fine control for scrubbing 1 hour audio files, especially the scenario of skip back 10 seconds.

Syncing my address book with Yahoo! is great, since that's my primary contact store these days. Though there are a bunch of contacts I really don't need in there cluttering things up a bit. Minor annoyance.

All in all, it's a great product. If the phone companies and Apple actually gets the price down to $200 with a  contract, There are very few reasons why anyone should consider any other phone out there. Nokia, Motorola and the rest of the handset manufacturers better get their act together and soon. The bar is pretty damn high now for cell phone design.

This site won the online film Webby for best animation, and you can see why. There's some great stuff in there. Brokeback Mountain is one of the best.

Oh, and if you want to check out the web site Webby winners, this is the link.

As I've been doing a bunch of cross-browser CSS work, the one thing I would really love is a tool that would monitor the HTML and CSS files I'm working on, and when any one of them is saved to disk, refresh the page I'm working on in Firefox, IE6, IE7, and Safari. Of course this requires integration with a virtual machine on the Mac, but on Windows all of these browsers run natively.

Does anyone know of such a thing? Leave me a comment if you do. I'm getting sick of the manual refresh.

OK, it's a pretty cheesy song, but it's also infectious. It doesn't have a chorus like most pop songs; just a 4 bar intro and a 20-bar verse that is repeated twice. The last 8 bars of the verse have an interesting chord progression twist, switching over to the key of F and then hitting the climax of the progression on a novel chord--Fm6/Ab--before resolving nicely back into C via your standard lead in of F, and G. For those following along at home:

          C                                      F                    C
There's a small town in the mountains, where the streets are wide and still;

          F                             C           F C  
There are children making angels in the snow.

    F                 Gsus4            C       Em/B     Am     C/G
The sunset paints the sky at night; An old man works by candle light;

  Dm     /E F6                   G
A tiny baby smiles and waves hello.

       F         C/E      Dm7      Dm7/G C      Cmaj7/B
In the cold gray light of dawn, an eagle flies;

        Bb            F                G
And the men are happy wearing matching ties.

          Bb       F           Fm6/Ab          C
A pair of poodles;    A broken finger will not bend.

          Bb       F           C
Soup with noodles;    A female Klingon's drunk boyfriend.

        Bb   F               Fm6/Ab         C
A sexy lady;    This party's better than it seems.

       Bb           F              G               C
Warren Beatty; Dear sleeping giant panda: pleasant dreams.

If you want the MP3 for this song (one thing that really annoys me about YouTube is the decidedly low-fi mono audio tracks), you can get it directly from jonathancoulton.com here.

On Friday I moved into the 3rd office space I've had for my job in the past 6 months. The company is building out a new, larger space. But until that is finished sometime this summer, my team has been bouncing around the Valley occupying surplus space at the back of various start-ups.

The surprising thing is how well it works. I have a laptop as my primary computer, so it's pretty easy to set up shop anywhere there is power and Internet connectivity. I have a full-sized keyboard, mouse, and second monitor which all help with productivity, and they're pretty easy to move in one trip.

For my phone, I put my GrandCentral number on my business cards. And to make outgoing calls I've been perfectly happy using Yahoo! Voice or Skype on my computer; the quality is better than the cell phone, and I love the hand-free headset, which let's me continue to work on the computer while I talk.

The only thing I really miss is having a good, ergonomic chair that fits me well. Hmm, maybe I should get one an cart it around with me...

Toad the Wet Sprocket is one of my favorite bands of all time, and this is one of their best songs. It's about a unique topic that you don't often see in pop songs--trees. It also is brief at  less than 3 minutes, and doesn't waste any time in repetitive themes. It gets right to business, and walks through a long, novel chord progression before ending back up on the minor root. Subsequent phrases have slight variations to make things more interesting. There's also nice use of harmonic background vocals. This is pretty damn close to pop song perfection, IMHO.

Update (5/7/08): here is the chord progression which I figured over the last weekend. Enjoy.

F#m              D       E
     Are you the plane,

F#m  E          D            E  
     that shapes the board?

F#m       E/G#  A E5  D        E
     part of    a     history

F#m  E            D
     smoothed and worn. And

Bm    Cm    C#m      D              D#dim   D 
ohhhh            the windy weather,

D#dim      D      D#dim        E5
       dry spell,        brush fire

In a recent New York Times editorial David Brooks does a fine job laying out the real effect of globalization on job growth and loss. His main point is not that jobs (especially manufacturing jobs) have been lost to globalization. If manufacturing industries have been leaving the US for countries with cheap labor, then one would expect US global manufacturing share to decline -- but this is not the case.

"...U.S. manufacturing output is up over recent decades. As Thomas Duesterberg of Manufacturers Alliance/MAPI, a research firm, has pointed out, the U.S.'s share of global manufacturing output has actually increased slightly since 1980."

"...manufacturing productivity has doubled over two decades..."

"The chief force reshaping manufacturing is technological change... Employers now require fewer but more highly skilled workers."

So US manufacturing market share is up slightly in about a generation, but productivity (i.e. output per worker) has more than doubled. You can't quite compare those two concepts (since share is a percentage of a number not given), but if global manufacturing output doubled in that time (a guess), then there would have been no job manufacturing job growth (and even a big perceived loss, as the population went up by about 75 million people during that time).

But I believe there's a more subtle problem that Brooks misses, or at least ran out of space to address: flexibility. In an automated factory, output can be increased only to a certain level -- then more capital equipment needs to be purchased, installed, configured, etc. and that is very expensive. In a completely manual factory, adding capacity means hiring and training new workers. In the US at least, when times get tough, it is pretty easy to shed workers. But the resources spent on capital equipment generally cannot be recovered.

To me this means that US manufacturing flexibility is a bit like French job creation: employers are reluctant to take on new expenses that cannot be easily undone if times get tough.

Yet another study on how factory farming is horrible for the environment.

[Factory farms] often pose unacceptable risks to public health, the environment and the animals themselves while shifting rural America's economic power from farmers to livestock processors.

This—coupled with the UN report from a year ago—makes a very compelling case on why you must be a vegan if you care at all about the environment. I'm sorry to say that recycling your bottles and driving a hybrid just doesn't cut it anymore.

I recently purchased a Motorola T505 Bluetooth speaker phone for my car. It works well enough, but there are these little annoyances that get in the way of truly seamless use. Sometimes my phone will get "stuck" in a mode where it thinks it is still connected to the speakerphone long after I have walked away. The speakerphone refuses to play audio when the phone is in "silent" mode. Sometimes the call pickup or disconnect functions don't work quite right, and so on.

Interestingly, I've noticed these sort of annoyances since the beginning with Bluetooth based products. There are very, very few Bluetooth connections that "just work" and continue to do so. On top of that, the model is fairly complex: many people probably don't understand all of the subtleties of "discover," "pair," "passcode," and "authorize." I don't think any of these concepts are super difficult, but it seems that almost no implementation gets everything right, and I think that is a clue to an underlying problem.

Bluetooth as a specification seems to be very complex for real humans to implement well. It has been around for about a decade, so by this point the basics should be very mature, and I'm sure they are. But all of these annoyances indicate to me that maybe important parts of the specification are too complex or poorly defined. It's easy to point fingers are the implementations and just say that the chip vendors or driver writers or operating system engineers made mistakes. It's also easy to say the the user interface designers did a poor job of integrating the technology into the user experience.

All of those engineers are undoubtedly guilty of making mistakes -- they (we) always do. Unfortunately with some technologies it just seems easier than otherwise to stumble.

As I am deep in the innards of the HTML and CSS of the web site I'm working on, I've found that <div style="clear:both"></div> is a really useful tool. It basically sets an invisible horizontal rule for starting a new section of content. Funny thing is that you have to have the explicit closing tag for it to work; <div style="clear:both" /> won't do it.

Depending on who you ask, there's a new blog created about every second or so. There seem to be far fewer unique and interesting things to say.

I've been doing cross-browser CSS styling for work, and what a PITA that has been. My most recent discovery is that Firefox conveniently adds the padding to elements after sizing them to 100% of the parent. So let's say you want a form text field that is as wide as the parent div. You set style="width:100%". But now the text abuts the left edge of the text entry box. So you add a left pad: style="width:100%;padding-left:4px". Now the text looks great, but WTF?! the right edge is no longer aligned with the parent DIV. In fact is extends by 4px. It'd be nice if this worked: style="width:100% - 4px;padding-left:4px", but of course it doesn't.

So you have the brilliant idea of using text-indent instead. After all, that's what this property was intended to handle. style="width:100%;text-indent:4px". Perfect. Looks great. Except on IE where for some logic-defying reason, the browser actually indents the entire text field rather than just the text inside the field. WTF?! Who are these people who implement the CSS standards and where do I sign up to beat them with an improvised bolo made from an old 56k modem & phone cord.

Thankfully someone intelligent on the IE team realized that their rendering engine was so broken, that web developers might need to write IE-specific code to handle it without making the display look like a bad interpretation of Picasso's home page. So now I've added the following to my web page:

  <!--[if IE]>
    <style type="text/css">
      INPUT .textfield {
        padding-left:4px;
        text-indent:0; }
    </style>
  <![endif]-->

And that's when I took up heavy drinking to dull the pain...