Lately I’ve been spending my Sunday evenings listening to Steve Earle’s show on air america radio. Talk about someone who’s come through the other side with his head on straight. Oh Condalezza won’t you come out tonight, indeed.
Have you seen one of my heros? Bob Dylan, the man who started up where Woody Guthrie left off, has been disconcertingly silent lately when it comes to issues that it seems everyone is weighing in on. Not only that but in his recent autobiography he rejects the notion that he ever spoke for a generation of the time:
A few years earlier Ronnie Gilbert, one of The Weavers, had introduced me at one of the Newport Folk Festivals saying, “And here he is … take him, you know him, he’s yours.” I had failed to sense the ominous forebodings in the introduction. Elvis had never even been introduced like that. “Take him, he’s yours!” What a crazy thing to say! Screw that. As far as I knew, I didn’t belong to anybody then or now. I had a wife and children whom I loved more than anything else in the world. I was trying to provide for them, keep out of trouble, but the big bugs in the press kept promoting me as the mouthpiece, spokesman, or even conscience of a generation. That was funny. All I’d ever done was sing songs that were dead straight and expressed powerful new realities. I had very little in common with and knew even less about a generation that I was supposed to be the voice of. I’d left my hometown only ten years earlier, wasn’t vociferating the opinions of anybody. My destiny lay down the road with whatever life invited, had nothing to do with representing any kind of civilization. Being true to yourself, that was the thing. I was more a cowpuncher than a Pied Piper.
People think that fame and riches translate into power, that it brings glory and honor and happiness. Maybe it does, but sometimes it doesn’t. I found myself stuck in Woodstock, vulnerable and with a family to protect. If you looked in the press, though, you saw me being portrayed as anything but that. It was surprising how thick the smoke had become. It seems like the world has always needed a scapegoat - someone to lead the charge against the Roman Empire. But America wasn’t the Roman Empire and someone else would have to step up and volunteer. I really was never any more than what I was a folk musician who gazed into the gray mist with tear-blinded eyes and made up songs that floated in a luminous haze. Now it had blown up in my face and was hanging over me.
A few excerpts and an interview here: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6099172/site/newsweek/
Crap. I think he just weighed in. Sounds to me like a bitter man in his twilight looking back and rejecting what he once stood for. Scratch Mr. Zimmerman off my relevant people list.
Authorware’s authorware script (aws) syntax checker will always be more new-coder friendly than any javascript checker could be. The fact that syntax checking occurs everytime you close an authorware script calc icon makes it so - the code in the calc icon is essentially being compiled. What’s great about this is that things like function calls and their arguments as well as object (icon) references can be verified without the need to execute the script. Once you close a calc you can be pretty much certain that your aws is syntactically correct. Of course it may not do what is expected of it but you are now free to test the behaviour of your guaranteed-to-compile piece. Certainly more javascript checking is possible, however due to the very nature of the language the modularized verification done at the icon level would be very difficult, if not impossible, to achieve. With augmentations like strict data typing and other features of the ECMAScript 4 standard this is partially achievable but the entire piece - not just a particluar calc - will always need to be compiled to implement the aws level of checking at the calc level.
Don’t read anything into this observation. Both solutions have their advantages and disadvantages.
So I wanted to watch that docu-ganda film Going Upriver that is being offered as a free download over at thekerrymovie.com to see what all the fuss was about. Keep reading, this is not a political rant - I haven’t finished downloading it yet. This is the first time in ages that I have done that “okay, what am I gonna do while this thing downloads” look around. The most I really download is my few MB legitimately obtained mp3s. Reminds me of the dial up days: connect, fire up the email client, begin downloading messages and then go for a beer or tea, or whatever…
