Picture of the day: Best Twitter Bot Ever
Via John Myles White.
Can you spare a dollar?
Yesterday there was a news story about a man who committed a bank robbery for only one dollar.
In North Carolina, on the morning of June 9th, James Verone walked into a bank and handed the teller a note that read, “This is a bank robbery. Please only give me one dollar.” Once given his meagre loot, he said, “I’ll be sitting right over there in the chair waiting for the police.”
And why would he do this? In the hopes of receiving health care in prison. Mr. Verone has some serious health problems, no insurance, and is unable to work. Having exhausted his savings, he decided this was his best option, calmly put his affairs in order and went for a walk to a bank.
It’s one of those stories that gives me the impulse to smugly sit here around the other side of the planet, shake my head and think, “Only in America.” But there are disenfranchised and desperate people in any society.
Last year I was going into the city a few evenings a month for various user group meetings and the like. I was surprised by often being approached by homeless or street people asking for any spare change.
In the past, I’d tended to give these people short shrift and keep walking, but a friend of mine turned me around on this one evening when he was approached by a man who was asking for some money so he would have a safe place to sleep that night. He talked with the man for a little bit, gave him the few dollars he had in his pocket and wished him luck.
I gave what is probably the usual reaction. “Hey, you don’t know why he really wants that. He’s probably gonna go drink it or shoot up or something.” His response realigned my thinking. He said that here was somebody in front of him who was in such desperation that he would approach strangers in the street, asking for help. Had swallowed their pride and needed to beg. The very absolute least you can do is take them at face value and give them a few bucks. Shrugging he concluded, “Never miss an opportunity to practise compassion.”
Some rights reserved by looseends Mr. Verone’s heist reminded me of another story I heard not so long ago. In the early 1900’s the Mayor of New York, Fiorello LaGuardia had a habit of showing up at a municipal court and presiding as judge. An opportunity that not many Mayors availed themselves of.
The story goes that this particular night during the Great Depression, and old woman was being charged for stealing a loaf of bread. She told the mayor that she did it because her two grandchildren were starving. The shopkeeper refused to drop the charges, wanting her as an example because it was a “real bad neighbourhood.”
His hands tied, LaGuardia charged the woman a fine of ten dollars. As he was pronouncing this judgement though, he took off his hat, threw in ten dollars, and announced this he was remitting the fine. Not only that, but he fined everyone in the courtroom fifty cents for living in a town where a person has to steal bread so that her grandchildren can eat.
The hat was passed to the bailiff, who used it to collect the fines from seventy odd people in the courtroom that evening: petty criminals, traffic offenders, a few lawyers, and one narked shopkeeper. The bewildered grandmother was handed the collection and sent home to her family.
“Law is nothing unless close behind it stands a warm living public opinion.”
I hope public opinion is warm for Mr. Verone.
Discovery of the Week: Clementine Music Player
Today I want to talk about a great little music player called Clementine. But first, a bit about magpies.
The Australian Magpie is a medium-sized black and white bird found all over Australia and parts of New Guinea. Although wild, it is not unusual for them to be fed by suburban and rural households, and they are a common mascot for sporting teams.
They are also quite territorial, and during their breeding season get quite aggressive and will swoop at pedestrians and particularly cyclists. As a boy, I remember one day climbing up through the middle of the wood pile, popping out the top only to get a flash of black and white feathers and wind up back at the bottom again wondering what just happened.
On the other hand, the European Magpie isn’t known for swooping people. Their penchant is a famous affinity for shiny objects, often stealing them to decorate their nests.
Indeed, people who flitter from one “the next big thing” to the next are often likened to a magpie, being easily distracting by shiny things. Then there are those people who realise what they’ve already got is pretty darn good and work hard to improve upon that foundation instead.
And with that, I’d like to introduce you to Clementine, a playlist-oriented music player with strong support for large library collections.
Clementine works on Linux, Windows and Mac OS X, so it will work on just about any desktop or laptop you have. I find Clementine thinks about playing music the same way I do. On the left panel you have your music library, or your file system, or your streaming radio stations, all of which you can drag over to the playlist on the right and organise however you want.
You can even set up several playlists in the tabbed interface to have your different listening needs lined up and ready to go.
While playing your music the left panel can also be used to display information about the current artist, or info and lyrics for the current song, along with album art, and many other features which I’m sure the developers will add in the future.
But really, the killer feature for me is its handling of compilation albums. I have a lot of soundtracks and other ‘various artists’ type albums. In most other players when you list by artist you get every single artist for every single song in your library, and you’re wondering what music this artist has, and see that there is only one or two songs for them as part of a larger album. For me this just clutters things up when your perusing your music (besides, that’s what the search feature is for).
With Clementine, compilation albums are put under “Various Artists” and you can scan through them all together. If the library manager has broken the album up under the individual artists then no problem, just right-click on the songs and select, “Show in various artists” and presto, your done.
It has many other features too, like tag editing, visualisations, copying music to your phone or MP3 player, kittens and much more, so give it a go!
Suffering-Oriented Programming
Looked at a presentation deck on Slide Share the other day called Become Efficient or Die: The Story of BackType and one of the things that resonated with me is the concept of suffering-oriented programming.
In a nutshell:
Don’t add process until you feel the pain of not having it.
Don’t build new technology until you feel the pain of not having it.
First make it possible. Then, make it beautiful. Then, make it fast.
Mind you, while I get where they’re coming from, there might be something said for anticipating where your going to feel the pain and being a bit proactive instead of reactionary. I guess as with most things it’s balance.
Other points I liked:
Overengineering = Attempting to create beautiful software without a thorough understanding of the problem domain.
Premature optimisation = Optimising before creating “beautiful” design, creating unnecessary complexity.
Refactoring and reducing technical debt = Garbage collection for the code base.
Check out the whole presentation below:
Sitewide Feed
Comments Feed
