Rather than IM the hell out of Marjorie about her latest column, “An Education on Good Education” I thought I’d put my thoughts down here and link it (and digg her too).

This is one of those columns where Marjorie was on fire, there are too many good quotes to pull them all, but here are some of my favorites:

Remember the column I did, back in the Pleistocene era, making fun of parents who obsessed about getting their kids into the 92nd Street Y preschool? This is the column where I eat that column. …

But: I now understand the fear that one’s child won’t get a good education if one doesn’t go to the mat for it.

I would add that your child won’t get a good education relying only on school, which I’m pretty sure Marjorie would agree with.

But when your 4-year-old tells you, The most important thing about school is no matter how hard someone hits you, it’s wrong to hit back, you know she’s going somewhere else for kindergarten.

WTF is our children learning?

Josie is a few months older than Lila, and so she missed the Dept. of Ed cutoff regarding which year. Ironically, or something, had Josie gone to private school, which use a different calendar, they would have been in the same year.

We reapplied to The Neighborhood School. It had been my first choice last year, with the small size, progressive philosophy and mixed-age classrooms I liked in the school Josie got into, but with higher test scores and a long-established and well-respected principal. Last year, Josie’s name wasn’t picked in the lottery. (The school is kept balanced deliberately by race, reflecting roughly the same demographic breakdown as the neighborhood: something like 31% white, 21% black, 32% Latino and 18% Asian.)

First, there is some seriously questionable selection going on with these “Lotteries.” I’m not going to go into accusations I can’t backup, but a significant increase in transparency would be a good thing for all the schools.

Second, racial quotas: I don’t like them, but in this case it’s almost amusing how badly they’ve played out. This is the year the September 11th Baby Boom lands in public school Pre-K. The population of four year-olds in New York City has ballooned, with most born sometime after May 2002. I find it deeply poetic that humanity’s innate reaction to death and carnage is babies.

In our neighborhood, the population demographic has fully inverted. The progeny of the hipsters and young, formerly childless couples who lived in the East Village don’t fit the Department of Ed’s out-of-date demographic. The result is that Neighborhood School, everyone’s first choice, got that demograpic. Earth School probably got close to the demographic “ideal” since it’s usually the number-two choice (despite having an upside-down picture of their namesake planet in their science room).

Which brings us to our school, East Village Community School. The Pre-K classes are overwhelmingly white and female. As racial and class boundaries seem to track closely in our rapidly gentrifying neighborhood, the DOE’s imposed diversity program will likely cause a drastic upending the funding balance between this group of schools. My biggest hope is that they don’t break things more by trying to fix these new imbalances.

Last week a friend at the playground said something about visiting relatives who wanted to watch some TV show about September 11th. He was working downtown in 2001, and went to twenty-five funerals. I didn’t go to any. Everyone I knew, even those who worked in the towers, got out. Each year I skim over the lists of victims, wondering if there was anyone I’d lost touch with who was killed in the attacks. There’s always someone with my first name, or my wife’s or my childrens’. It’s something about having been here, the knowledge that everything I love could have been taken away that day, and how important it is to remember and honor those who weren’t so lucky.

I watched some of the video that never gets played anymore. Looked at a few pictures and re-read my own posts from previous September 11ths; 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005. Otherwise I’ve avoided the media as much as possible, I have a lot of thoughts about what this day has become, but those have no place in my head today. It’s still fresh for me.

This morning I took Noemi to her first toddler gymnastics class — lots of things are starting today. Out our front window I’m pretty sure I saw the President’s helicopter crossing the East River towards Ground Zero. The only bells I got to hear were those marking the Flight 11 at 8:46 am. I knelt down and watched Noemi through watery eyes while the traffic kept rushing up First Avenue. Not that many people stopped.

A lot has changed in five years. Both my daughters were born. Dozens of other children became a part of our lives, almost all of them born into this post-September 11th world. Friends married and divorced, new friends came into our lives, some old friends drifted away. Some passed on. Some things were built and others fell apart. More was learned than forgotton.

I’m planning on walking by several fire stations after Noemi naps, shaking hands and saying thanks. Today isn’t just another day, and won’t be for a very long time.

Love, and let those you love know it.

Following up on yet-another dot-mac-sucks post, TUAW posted something of a petition drive to improve the .Mac service.

I just got a notice about updating my credit card so my .Mac account can auto-renew next month, and I was already seriously thinking about letting it lapse. The timing must have been right, here’s the feedback I left at the .Mac feedback form:

> My membership is up next month and I’m considering not renewing. I’ve been a member since the beginning, but $100 just seems like a lot of money for what we’re getting, and I’m just not using that much of the service.

> There is some buzz online about dissatisfacton with the .Mac service, and I think it’s justified. I hope you will be introducing more features, and especially more value in the near future. .Mac just hasn’t lived up to its promise or kept pace with cheaper or free competitors.

> At very least, all .Mac subscribers should get a complimentary QT Pro license.

That last bit has been an ongoing pet peeve of mine since before OS X. Apple is legally prevented from giving away several of the codecs in Quicktime, but AFAIK, there’s nothing preventing QT Pro licenses from being bundled in with all sorts of other software. Since crippling QT brings down the user experience of an otherwise great Apple product, it is in Apple’s best interest to make it absurdly easy to get QT Pro licenses. Maybe that “whole package” thing Steve Jobs talked about at WWDC could finally include QT Pro too, but I feel confident is saying it won’t. It should, but it won’t.

When combining an existing AppleScript record with another overlapping record, the order of concatenation matters. Consider this example:

set breakfast to {food:"toast", drink:"coffee"}
set lunch to breakfast & {food:"sandwich"}

--- lunch is {food:"toast", drink:"coffee"}

Because breakfast comes before lunch (naturally, when I get to eat breakfast), food is already defined and isn’t recast by the new record. So we get toast for lunch.

Flipping the order of how the lunch record is built gives the expected result, and a better lunch:

set breakfast to {food:"toast", drink:"coffee"}
set lunch to {food:"sandwich"} & breakfast

--- lunch is {food:"sandwich", drink:"coffee"}

While discussing whether the cliffs around Bar Harbor were fjords (Somes Sound is), the origin of the phrase “pining for the fjords” came up.

Monty Python, of course, here it is:

After some tests, I’m convinced that Adobe’s CS2 apps are incapable of saving PNGs without shifting colors. I tried every combination of Color Management settings as well as input color spaces. No matter what I tried, the designated RGB values I started with were getting shifted when saved as PNG. Saving the same documents as GIFs output the correct colors.

I posted the following to Adobe’s Forums, including my workaround solution:

>Wasted a very frustrating hour with this today. There is definitely a color shift in PNG output that seems consistent across several CS2 apps. I first hit the bug using Illustrator’s
“Save for Office…”, which saves a hi-res PNG of the current Illustrator doc. After that failed a few dozen times (I tried a variety of color management settings, despite being hardware calibrated), I switched to Illustrator’s “Save for Web…” option. This produced exactly the same shift. Identical problems in Photoshop, though lesser when saving directly to PNG and skipping “Save for Web”.

>My solution was to save the Illustrator file as a GIF, then open that in the OS X Preview app, then resave as a PNG. Worked perfectly with zero color shift.

>This is Adobe’s bug, not a problem with the PNG format.

A few friends recently asked about whether or not they should buy a new MacBook Pro or wait a little longer for whatever’s coming next.

My first reaction, conditioned on years of Mac use and purchasing, was, “of course you should wait, there’s likely to be a new chip in the MacBook Pros any day now!”

I think I was wrong. Moreover, I think that whole line of thinking is finished.

We already know what the next chip in the MacBook Pros will be: The Core 2 Duo, probably running at 2.4 and 2.67ghz. None of this is a surprise, it’s all published on Intel’s Processor Roadmap and related documents.

Intel sticks to their roadmap. The roadmap doesn’t show any Core2 Duo chips in laptops before 2007. Despite the rumors, I’ll be surprised to see anyone shipping Core2 Duo laptops in quantity before Halloween (the actual first shopping day of the holiday season). Of course this is all speculation and I may be wrong.

The next CPU Intel designs will not make the previous model obsolete. They work on the principle of incremental progress. Mac users aren’t conditioned to understand incremental progress. Consider:

* The PPC blew away the 68k
* G3s crushed PPCs
* G4s ran circles around G3s
* The G5 was so hot it needed liquid cooling (and was faster than the G4s).
* The first Intel MacBook Pros were 5-10 times faster than the previous PowerBooks.

That kind of repeated beating gets you some learnin’. Thankfully, the days of imminent obsolescence are likely over.

The Core2 Duo is not radically better than the Core Duo. It is incrementally better, in some areas more than others. Compare the charts in this Core 2 Duo vs. Core Duo article on AnandTech. While some application tests do show a 10-15% performance improvement, most reveal 3–5%. Gaming Performance is almost identical between the chips. Also remember that a 10% speedup is equivalent to 0.2ghz of processor speed, something that tends to happen anyway between product cycles or could improve if you learn how to overclock amd fx 6300.

> **The performance difference here is not enough to justify an upgrade if you’re a Core Duo owner**, but for a first time buyer if prices are the same, the Core 2 Duo is simply the right choice.

Some in the higher nerd-echelons have realized the “shortcomings” of the Core 2 Duo and are already lusting after Intel’s next CPU, the mythical Santa Rosa platform. Me? I’m going to stop stressing about processors and enjoy my MacBook Pro for a while without worrying that it will be obsolete tomorrow.

Software however, that’s a whole other story…