As I've mentioned before, I've spent some of my time this summer working on a Rails application, tentatively named Notable Notebook. I'm not quite ready to let people try it out for themselves, but, with summer's end approaching, I figured I would put together a video walkthrough.

I apologize for this screencast's many defects. Enjoy. (As much as is possible.)

Watch the Video

Earlier this morning, Apple sent reporters invitations to its annual iPod media event, scheduled to take place this year on 9 September. Apple also sent many of its educational customers, such as myself, a marketing email to remind everyone that their back-to-school promotion, in which educational buyers receive a free iPod with the purchase of a Mac, ends on 8 September.

It's no secret that Apple's back-to-school promotion is designed to help them clear out their inventory of old iPods before the holiday shopping season arrives along with revamped iPods. I do admire, however, how ruthlessly Apple runs the promotion. The very day after their back-to-school promotion ends, new iPods will almost certainly be unveiled. Such is the consumer electronics industry.

After I posted my last piece on Snow Leopard, I received a couple of emails from friends at school asking me why the Bates College "Help Desk" folks had advised them against upgrading. At first, I was baffled.

I've had Snow Leopard installed since last night, and I tested every application I use on a regular basis — R, Mathematica, Word, Excel, Photoshop, Illustrator, Coda, et al. — to make make sure I can go back to school without a hitch next week. Unfortunately, I completely forgot one very important application: Cisco's pathetic excuse for a piece of software, the Clean Access Agent.

Said software, which I've blogged about on a number of other occasions, facilitates access to the Bates campus network. It's a terrible implementation of a very good idea: ensuring users have the right credentials and security features installed before allowing them onto the network.

So, naturally, it turns out the Cisco Clean Access Agent does not work on Snow Leopard. To put it mildly, I find this inexcusable. Registered developers, like Cisco's engineers, have had access to pre-release versions of Snow Leopard since June 2008. That's over a year. That one of the world's largest technology companies couldn't manage to bring their software up-to-date in the space of 14 months is outrageous.

The folks at the OmniGroup, who develop such wonderful applications as OmniFocus and OmniGraffle, had fully Snow Leopard compatible versions of each and every one of their applications the day before Snow Leopard shipped. This in spite of the fact that each one of the OmniGroup's applications is probably an order, or several orders, of magnitude more complex than Cisco's dinky little Clean Access Agent, and the OmniGroup is a tiny company with far fewer than 1000 employees.

All this incident has done is reinforce my perception that the Cisco Network Access Control product is really, really awful. Get on it Cisco!

It took a lot of luck, a touch of ingenuity and a great deal of pain to install Snow Leopard; though my travails are no fault of Apple's. The whole sad sorry tale is long and dull, so I will skip it here. Interested parties should read my Twitter updates concerning the ordeal. My unique installation woes aside, Snow Leopard is a great $29 investment for anyone who has a 64-bit capable Intel-based Mac.

Beginning with the installation process, once I had the installation DVD working, everything was a breeze. Apple's claim that it only takes 15 minutes to install is a bit out of whack — it took more like an hour — but the process was painless and error-free. Not to mention it freed up about 20 gigabytes of space on my laptop's hard disk, far more than Apple's claimed 7 gigabyte gain. The installer freed up less space on my parents' iMac and my sister's MacBook Pro — those machines realized 16 and 14 gigabyte improvements, respectively — though the gains still beat Apple's advertisement.

Booting into Snow Leopard for the first time, it's clear why Apple priced the update at $29. From the user's point of view, nothing whatsoever has changed visually, aside from some of the Dock features, which I'll discuss later. The changes that Apple did make to the guts of the operating system, however, make a big difference.

For starters, Snow Leopard does a much better job of leveraging lots of RAM. Under Leopard, my "core four" applications — Safari, Mail, iTunes and Tweetie — rarely used more than a gigabyte of memory. Now, with just those four applications open, my laptop uses all of the two gigabytes of RAM I have installed. This makes a huge difference in terms of responsiveness: so much so that I'm upping my MacBook Pro to four gigabytes of RAM, as I suspect it will now make a perceptible difference.

Snow Leopard also realizes huge improvements in speed by running most of the core applications and processes in 64-bit mode. Everything feels much, much faster, from running a Spotlight search to browsing the Web with Safari. Unfortunately, though, my beloved Safari AdBlock — which does a great job of killing banner and Flash advertisements — only works when Safari runs in 32-bit mode. Otherwise, I'm just waiting for the rest of my applications to receive the 64-bit treatment.

The one big visual change Apple has made concerns the Dock, which now sports translucent gray contextual menus, rather than the system default off-white panels, in addition to a revamped implementation of Exposé. I have mixed feelings about the change in the Dock's context menu color scheme: it seems inconsistent. The new Exposé is also hit-and-miss in my book. Nouveau Exposé, as I'm calling it, arranges the windows in a predictable grid pattern, which lacks some of the charm of the original Exposé's higgledy-piggledy method of fitting the thumbnails on the screen. I do appreciate the fact that Nouveau Exposé includes thumbnails of any docked windows along with everything else.

Buying a copy of Snow Leopard should be a no-brainer for anyone using a 64-bit Intel Mac, especially given that Apple only charges $29 for a single-user licensee. (Users of the original Intel Macs with 32-bit Core Duo processors will see improvements as well, but they are not as pronounced.) Snow Leopard is, as Apple claims, the same Leopard everyone knows and loves, but snappier, more refined and better positioned to leverage new hardware.

It occurred to me that there's another compelling reason to improve the fidelity of our phone calls: fewer cell phone-related accidents on the road.

While I'm too lazy to find even an article on Wikipedia to back this claim up, I will assert that the amount of cognitive power required to understand an audio recording is inversely proportional to the quality of that recording. In other words, people have to use more of their brainpower to understand a poorly made recording than to understand a high quality recording.

If we take this to be true, it becomes clear that improving the fidelity of phone calls would reduce the number of cell phone-related driving accidents. The real danger posed by cell phone use while driving is not the physical distraction of fumbling for the phone or awkwardly holding the device against one's ear. In fact, studies — which I will conveniently not link to here — have shown that drivers using a hands free kit are no less distracted while driving than drivers who simply hold the phone to their ear. It's the cognitive distraction that causes problems. And, part of the reason that cell phone conversations are more of a cognitive distraction than, say, speaking to someone in the passenger seat, is the fact that drivers' brains must devote more of their cognitive power to understanding a low fidelity phone call than to understanding someone's un-garbled voice in the next seat over.

That said, I don't know whether improving the fidelity of cell phone calls would remove enough of the cognitive load placed on the brain by making the phone call to make driving-whilst-phoning safe. So it still might make more sense to ban cell phone use among drivers. But, at the very least, I have another reason to whine about the lamentable fidelity of phone calls.

Browsing the Web this morning, I discovered that theory — the minimalist fashion label of which I'm a big fan — has a company blog. Admittedly, it's a very fluffy, mostly useless blog, but a blog nonetheless. It has the conventional reverse chronological display of posts and communicates goings-on at the company with the world. The theory blog does, however, have one notable quirk: there's no way to subscribe to the blog via RSS, Atom or any other syndication system. It's so un-blog-like I might go so far as to say any "blog" without a feed shouldn't be considered a blog at all.

Pondering this for a few minutes, it occurred to me that, for the most part, high-end fashion labels have really awful websites. Awful in the sense that they're usually herky-jerky Flash-based sites that are impossible to navigate, and try to convey a sense of luxury and sensuality through an endless stream of flashy, molasses-slow effects.

I can certainly see what the companies are trying to achieve, but they needn't sacrifice baseline usability features to create beautiful, "high-end" websites. Just compare the websites of Paul Smith and Prada, two top-end fashion labels. Both websites do a good job of conveying their respective messages. But that's where the similarities end. The Paul Smith website loads quickly, complies with web standards and does not require a virtual compass to navigate. The Prada website on the other hand, takes an eternity to load and jerks users from place to place using weird transitions. Not to mention that it's next to impossible to browse their collection of photos from fashion shows without screaming at the computer at least once because the interface is so awful.

I know there are web developers in Italy. These companies need to hire them. Using HTML, CSS and JavaScript like the rest of the world will not dilute brands: it will make websites easier to use. That means more eyeballs will spend more time fixating on expensive socks. So please, garment industry, be better Web citizens.

Every year, a group of French musicians band together to raise money for Les restaurants du coeur ("Restaurants of the Heart"), an organization that provides hot meals to those in need. The entertainers, who are collectively referred to as Les Enfoirés (literally, "The Dumbasses"), put on a big benefit concert, and release a CD with studio-recorded and live versions of the music. The proceeds from the concert ticket and CD sales support the charity.

I like to keep a dash of French pop music in my music collection to keep up my French language skills, and I've found the albums released by Les Enfoirés usually have a nice mix of listenable, popular tunes I can live with.

But obtaining this music outside of France is a challenge.

In a perfect world, I would be able to buy the album online — though iTunes or another digital music distribution channel — from the comfort of my desk. I wish this were possible not only because I want to compensate the artists for their work, but also because the proceeds support a worthwhile cause. For whatever reasons, though, the music never appears in the iTunes Store outside its French flavor. (Probably something to do with licensing, but that's another story.)

In theory that would leave me with two options: buy an imported CD from France or download an illegal copy of the music from a seedy corner of the Internet. Frankly, I would prefer the latter method, despite my obsession with following rules and regulations. Amazon.com, for instance, charges almost $56 for the group's 2009 compilation, Les Enfoirés font leur cinéma — the same product that sells on iTunes France for about 15 Euros.

Strangely, though, I have not been able to find a high-quality pirated copy of the album, even after months of searching. When it first occurred to me that I would never find a pirated copy of the album, I was nonplussed. Now I am in awe.

People in France, it seems, realized that putting pirated copies of the album online would deprive a laudable charity of money to do good, and they thus decided not to put pirated copies online.

As an example, I found one low-quality copy of Les Enfoirés font leur cinéma on a BitTorrent site that will remain unnamed. In the comments area on the download page, commenters fell into one of two camps. Those in the first group chastised the person responsible for posting the file for depriving the needy of food. Those in the second group implored people who downloaded the album illegally to buy a copy of the album to avoid depriving the needy of food.

I'm not sure what conclusions to draw about this, but I thought it was something worth mentioning.

I hate talking on the phone.

Part of me hates the fact that I can't make eye contact with the other person. Even in bona fide face-to-face conversation, few things irritate me more than people who don't make eye contact when we're speaking. But more than that, I hate talking on the phone because the sound quality is so inexcusably awful. I've stopped counting the number of times I embarrass myself because I couldn't understand what the other person on the phone was saying. To think, I can upload photos to Flickr or download music from iTunes anywhere I have a cell signal, but the sound quality of phone calls has remained virtually unchanged over the last two decades!

Industry executives usually respond to such criticism with the claim that offering higher fidelity phone calls would overtax their networks, landline and cellular. Call me a skeptic. While I'm not an expert in today's super efficient audio compression algorithms — or any other audio processing algorithms for that matter — I have used Skype to make voice calls.

Many people like Skype because it makes long distance calls either inexpensive or free. I love Skype because the sound quality is so deliciously good. When I speak to someone on Skype, their voice doesn't sound mechanical, processed or tinny. It sounds more like that person is sitting across from me in the same room. What's more, the folks at Skype manage to transmit their high fidelity voice calls at between 24 and 128 kilobits per second. For reference, most phone calls in the United States require about 40 kilobits per second of data transmission capacity.

This to me says that telecoms could easily transmit high fidelity phone calls without any major changes in bandwidth requirements. Assuming, of course, that improved sound quality does not increase customer demand for phone use.

There's something obnoxiously ironic about the fact that, of all the features phone companies could have improved over the years, the quality of their core product — phone calls — has barely budged. I love that my iPhone can take pictures, surf the Web and send email. But I would be happier still if all those features did not come at the expense of my phone having an improved "phone" feature.

Whole Foods CEO John Mackey ruffled more than a few feathers when he published an op-ed piece, "The Whole Foods Alternative to ObamaCare," in the Wall Street Journal last week. Loyal, insanely liberal Whole Foods shoppers were outraged to discover the company's CEO advocating for everything from the creation of health savings accounts to tort reform to lower doctors' medical malpractice costs. But I don't see the problem.

In the spirit of full disclosure, I'm not the "typical" Whole Foods shopper, as much as I fetishistically shop there. Unlike most of the people I encounter at my local Whole Foods, for instance, I vociferously oppose the so-called "public option" for healthcare that President Obama has pushed so hard to make reality. I'm also not a big fan of wearing flip flops, for what it's worth.

Nevertheless, I applaud many of the company's practices that endeared Whole Foods to the liberal élite. They offer all employees healthcare, pay reasonable wages, source many of their delicious products from small, local suppliers, and donate boatloads of money to local and national charities, just for starters. (Granted, I also applaud their excellent selection of French cheeses and wide variety of imported chocolate.)

But the CEO's personal opinions with regard to healthcare have absolutely no bearing on such corporate initiatives. Even if Mr. Mackey had come out in favor of an indisputably repugnant policy, like denying healthcare to the poor, I doubt whether Whole Foods would have abandoned its programs to funnel money to local charities that promote community gardening. No person could possibly claim with any conviction that limits on medical malpractice damages would somehow alter the way community gardens function.

What really baffles me, though, is that many of Mr. Mackey's proposals both make sense and should resonate with those on the "extreme left," for want of a better term. Even people who campaign for tree suffrage cannot possibly think it reasonable that a patient whose rhinoplasty left one nostril slightly larger than the other deserves hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars in medical malpractice damages. The only people who lose if that proposal — one of several in Mr. Mackey's piece — are medical malpractice attorneys, whose welfare I doubt political activists care much about.

Further, Mr. Mackey concludes his piece with a statement about the importance of eating well. (He is the CEO of a grocery store chain, after all.) This, at least as far as I can tell, meshes quite well with the whole "prevention" angle that the Democrats love to trumpet. What's not to love?

Some took particular issue with Mr. Mackey's statement regarding the "healthcare-as-intrinsic-right" issue. Unlike his supposedly left-leaning shoppers, Mr. Mackey does not buy the idea that healthcare ought to be a right. It seems clear to me, though, that none of these people actually read Mr. Mackey's piece in the Wall Street Journal. Or if they did, they should also be claiming that Mr. Mackey — who runs a grocery store chain — also opposes providing people food and shelter. He presents a more nuanced view of the matter.

In his own words, "Many promoters of health-care reform believe that people have an intrinsic ethical right to health care -- to equal access to doctors, medicines and hospitals. While all of us empathize with those who are sick, how can we say that all people have more of an intrinsic right to health care than they have to food or shelter?" Not exactly cold hearted.

Mr. Mackey made an important, substantive contribution to the debate over healthcare reform. I can't see why so many people find his piece so objectionable. His opinions might not mesh perfectly with those of his shoppers, but neither do all of President Obama's views mesh perfectly with my own. That didn't stop me from voting for him in November. Now excuse me while I pour myself a glass of that delicious sparkling blood orange soda I bought at Whole Foods over the weekend.

On Monday CourseSmart took the wraps off its iPhone application, which will allow students who rent electronic textbooks from CourseSmart to read their textbooks on their iPhones and iPod touches. I suppose, in theory, this might be a good idea. Students don't usually pay as much for the textbooks they rent from CourseSmart and, assuming they are one with their cell phones, always have their books at hand. Environmental types like that trees needn't be cut down, and publishes love the juicy margins on electronic books.

But who would want to read a textbook on an iPhone? The screen, while adequate for reading short emails or watching the occasional video clip, is hardly ideal for reading dense technical literature or looking at detailed diagrams. Nor is the iPhone's battery life well-suited for the kind of last-minute studying so many of my peers subject themselves to before exams.

For that matter, who would even want to read a textbook on a computer screen or an electronic paper device? While both those options offer more screen real estate than the iPhone and, in the case of the computer, the ability to add whiz-bang features like animated diagrams, having the real book is still vastly superior.

I like to reference multiple textbooks simultaneously, or at least leave them open for later reference. Such a simple study setup is difficult pull off with electronic books, unless one owns a workstation with a pair of 30 inch displays, or a dozen Kindles. (Even at my fancy private New England liberal arts college, I no know one who boasts either arrangement.) But more importantly, I can lend real textbooks to other people, reference them as long as I own them and access them without an Internet connection.

Of course, six months from now I'll probably read another article in the Wall Street Journal about the iPhone application's runaway success. Sometimes the market acts in mysterious ways. Or perhaps consumers aren't as smart as we economic type like to think.

For years I have mocked and derided a certain television program called The OC. I watched one episode a few years ago, and I couldn't understand what everyone loved about it. Now I am somewhat embarrassed to admit that I was wrong. As it turns out, The OC is a reasonably good program. (If we exclude Mischa Barton's insane suicidal character.)

Before I offer my critique, I should explain the circumstances that led me to watch enough episodes of The OC -- and I have now watched more episodes than I care to admit -- to change my mind. After an oral surgery on Tuesday, I had a mandate from my periodontist to take prescription painkillers, which rob me of my ability to do just about everything. So I pulled up Hulu and looked for something to watch. What made me decide to revisit The OC I don't know, but after I watched the pilot, I realized I had made a grave error in judgement.

The show has wonderfully witty dialogue and a healthy dose of humor. It's clear the writers don't take the genre or the format too seriously. The characters' frequent references to "The Valley" -- a fictional television show about wealthy, attractive teenagers in California -- demonstrates a laudable level of self-mockery. In the series finale, when one of the characters comments, "You know these teen dramas go on forever," I laughed out loud. High praise indeed, given how rarely that happens when I'm watching TV.

I also found the characters far more personable and down-to-earth than the standard cast of run-of-the-mill vapid socialites on most such shows. While not everyone I know owns beachfront property in California or has an infinity pool in their backyard, at least none of the characters had valets or a helicopter at their beck and call.

And to all my classmates in high school who compared me to Seth Cohen: you were absolutely right. I doubt whether anyone would be surprised if I developed a color-coded holiday cheer scale using shades of beige. The outright overlap in our wardrobes makes me wonder if the show's producers had people tailing me at Urban Outfitters.

That said, the writers could have toned down Marissa Cooper (Mischa Barton's character). As I moved from season one into season two, I found myself fast forwarding through the scenes where she has a profound emotional breakdown. Once in awhile would be tolerable, but it seemed to me she was on the verge of leaping off a cliff in just about every episode.

Certainly, the quality of the show took a serious dive in season three -- I only sampled the third and fourth seasons -- but it is a pretty good show nevertheless. It's not on par with with a Victor Hugo novel by any means, but it's leaps and bounds better than the bulk of the garbage networks air. (And far, far, far better than the creator's current project Gossip Girl.) To all those I mocked and teased over the past six years, I apologize.