Last night we saw Shakespeare & Co.’s Midsummer Night’s Dream in Lenox. Over the course of the twenty years we’ve been going, this was one of the best productions of this play, and one of the flat out most enjoyable productions of them all. It’s hilarious.

Jeez, that guy could write! [Tags: shakespeare ]

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The recording industry group that is responsible for collecting the new outrageous fees from Internet radio stations – they pay per channel, as if “channels” made a lot of sense for build-your-own-stream sites like Pandora – has decided not to start collecting the stated fees, subject to negotiations. (See Salon.)

Good news…except how comfortable are you with Congress handing his power to the recording industry? On the other hand, Pandora’s Tim Westergren sees this as a victory for the people: Congress stepped in (and Ed Markey’s the guy, which is a good thing) because you and I complained so loudly.

We’ll see. In any case, it’s better than the shutdown we were facing. [Tags: internet_radio pandora politics media ]

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I read Jack Welch’s Straight from the Gut yesterday as research for something I’m thinking of writing about leadership. I was looking for what he thinks leadership is. Man, is “leadership” a squirrely concept! And, I’m pretty sure, corrupt – not in the taking-bribes sense but in the been-used-so-often-it-now-means-18-contradictory-things sense. It’s not even clear how to separate leaders from leadership: it’s perfectly possibly to have leaders who don’t exhibit leadership, and there can be people with leadership who have no followers. Leadership seems to be some set of idealized personal traits that have their own independent life.

We have teachers but no teachership. Librarians with no librarianship. Followers with no followship. Why do we need leadership?

My head’s a-swirl. [Tags: leadership business jack_welch ]

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David Pogue’s Missing Manual for OS X is just about perfect. It’s packed with explanations at the right level of specificity and generality – some of us like to have a mental model as well as step-by-step procedures – and it’s fun to read. In fact, I’ve been enjoying reading through it sequentially. Well done, suh!

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I’ve used and owned Macs since they were the Lisa, but they’ve never really gripped me. My new MacBook has. It’s a keeper, and I’m not sure I can tell you why any more than I could tell you why the previous didn’t take. I’m bonding with it even as we speak.

Now, having said that, let me tell you about the weird problems I’m having with it.

Thanks to your help, I got my terminal back running (it was a pfile problem). Now I have a new and more entertaining problem.

I noticed that some of the extra apps that had been on my disk were no longer there. E.g., GarageBand was gone, so was Process Manager, and maybe some more. So, I backed up to an external drive (SuperDuper, totally worth the $27) and reinstalled the apps (and only the apps) from my Apple CD’s. All seemed to go well, except when I rebooted, about two seconds after the desktop appeared, the desktop went up a couple of pixels in resolution. It doesn’t sound like a big deal, but it was enough to throw off the sharpness of on-screen type. Weirder, the screen shifted left those few pixels if I moved my mouse to the left, up if I moved my mouse up, etc. This happened even if I made small motions with my mouse in the middle of the screen; I didn’t have to go skating to the edge. Weird.

Here’s what’s probably a crucial clue: My official Apple CD’s are version 10.4.09, whereas the version of the OS installed on my hard drive is 10.4.10. Just to be very clear: My MacBook came with 10.4.10 installed, but with 10.4.09 CDs.

So, I reinstalled the OS, and not just the extra apps, from the CD’s, thinking maybe it was an incompatibility between the apps and the OS. Everything was fine except I had the same resolution problem. So, I restored from the system backup I had done. And all is well. No resolution problem. No screen shifting with the mouse problem. Of course, I still don’t have those extra apps, but I can live without them until I can get my hands on a 10.4.10 CD set…or until one of you figures out what the heck is going on.

Interesting, eh? Or maybe it’s so obvious to you that it’s not interesting…

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Among the phishing spams I got today was one addressing me as a Mid America Bank FSB customer (which I am not). Apparently there’s been a little mixup with my records, and they need me to submit all of my personal information, passwords, and embarrassing photos.

These scammers are so lazy that the URL to which I’m supposed to respond doesn’t even attempt to make it look like it’s a bank address. In fact, the domain is:

http://svindler.dk

Well, I guess you;d have no one to blame but yourself if you fell for this one.

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GalaxyZoo is a mechanical Turk site that uses the “If everyone classifies just one galaxy…” approach. So far, they have a million done. (Thanks to Timo Hannay for the link.) [Tags: everything_is_miscellaneous timo_hannay mechanical_turk astronomy science ]

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Jeremy Price passes along a Cat and Girl comic strip he thinks I’ll find amusing. He is correct. (I also like the other one he recommended.)

And to miss the point entirely, although the strip is right in pointing out that early TV shows didn’t show families watching TV, TV’s did figure in some of them in interesting, self-reflexive, possibly postmodern ways: In Burns & Allen in particular, George would go upstairs to watch TV to see what Gracie was up to in the show itself. [Tags: tv cat_and_girl comics ]

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I just finished Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue. As I blogged last week, I am knocked over by the breadth and depth of his learning, and his ability to pull together multiple threads. Just amazing.

I had first read the book shortly after it came out in 1981. I didn’t remember, however, that it is a cliffhanger. He does a magnificent job dismantling our principle-based view of morality. He proposes virtue as its replacement and does, well, a magnificent job of tracing the history of that concept through multiple millennia. And I am overall sympathetic to recognizing the role of community in the founding of morality and ethics. But I didn’t think he quite pulled the rabbit out of the hat. Perhaps that’s because he ends the book with his sleeve rolled up and up to the elbow in the hat. The positive construction of a value-based ethics he leaves for a later book. I haven’t read the later book :(

There are several key points in his positive account of the virtues that I didn’t think he grounded well enough, although I am happy to withhold judgment until I read the next book. In particular, I want to see if his notion of the intrinsic good of virtues gets him to where he wants to go (distinguishing important, moral virtues from other types of excellences), how much diversity in the taxonomy of virtues he allows, whether he can really maintain the idea that lives have (are constituted by?) narratives, and whether his notion that a moral community has to be in conversation about its purpose brings us back to the typical philosophical narcissism that says that the good life is the philosophical life.

Even so, the book is fantastic. For example, his few pages on Nozick and Rawls scratches just the itch I always knew I had about those two: They write about morality as if we are rational agents making up our minds about joining a community, rather than as complex creatures who only are what we are because we are already in a community. MacIntyre works similar magic on everything from Homer to Jane Austin. [Tags: alasdair_macintyre virtue philosophy ethics morality ]