DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

They’re not having a very merry Christmas at NoKa Chocolates.

A writer at dallasfood.org put together a 10-part expose and smackdown on the exclusive chocolatier, determining after extensive research that NoKa staff are simply melting down and repackaging $34/lb Bonnat couverture to make their $2080/lb NoKa chocolates.

In the process, the author coined* an amazing new word: sneetchcraft. In case you don’t have a two-year-old, this is a reference to The Sneetches, the Dr. Seuss story in which Sneetches with stars on their bellies feel superior to the Sneetches without. The story is about racial discrimination, but the point of the metaphor is that the packaging doesn’t improve the product. In an ironic twist, photos suggest that NoKa is actually damaging the chocolate while putting the virtual star on its belly.

I think NoKa will go the way of Milli Vanilli. Nobody likes to be deceived, even if there’s nothing fundamentally wrong with the product.

*Is the word “sneetchcraft” original with the dallasfood.org article? I think it is; Google turns up only 52 references to it as of this writing, all of which point back to dallasfood.org or to Seth Godin’s blog post about the series (which is where I learned about it).

Unable to withstand the allure of Rogue Amoeba’s MacSanta promotion (a 20% holiday discount on dozens of great OS X applications), I took some time this morning to test-drive an app that promises to help Get Me Organized.

(This is no small feat. A year and a half ago I purged my desktop. I loved the spartan appeal of it, the austerity of blank space. For about a month. Then the convenience of fast access buried my good intentions under 87 icons, a couple of which were folders containing yet more disorganized items that resisted proper filing. Like I said then, my clutter is recursive.)

The organizational app that had caught my eye is EagleFiler. It puts a 3-panel browser interface onto any folder of documents, providing a common navigational and viewing mechanism for disparate document types. It provides grouping, tagging and searching features as well, allowing the user to impose additional layers of organization and accessibility not normally afforded by the filesystem.

I have a folder of 8 years’ worth of work documents that are not as accessible as they could be… and the idea of storing them all under one UI, with tagging, definitely appeals. Currently I need at least four apps to view these documents: Preview (images and PDFs), OmniOutliner (I’ve used an outliner for all my note-taking, list-making, and project planning, dating back to Dave Winer’s re-release of More 3.1 in 1999), OpenOffice (Word and Excel docs), and BBEdit (text docs). EagleFiler could replace them all, and the Finder too.

Except that it doesn’t. At least, not yet. It thinks my OmniOutliner documents are folders. It can’t display the outlines, nor can it display OpenOffice spreadsheets (.ods), nor Excel spreadsheets (.xls), nor the contents of compressed tar (.tar.gz) archives.

I have no doubt most of these file formats will be supported by EagleFiler in the future, but at the moment, the app can’t display the 20% of documents I use the most. So for now it’s not a good fit.

Reeling from this letdown, I started shopping for a new task timer. I’ve been using BK Task Timer, which bothers me for three reasons:

1. It seems to have a terrible memory leak; e.g. I recently noticed it sucking up 150+ MB of RAM.
2. It’s slow; bringing the app to the front takes over a second, and starting the timer takes 2 more. On a dual 2GHz G5. WTF?
3. The “no frills” interface is hard to love. There’s so much Mac software that looks cool. This does not. And I have to look at it a couple times a day.

Unfortunately, everybody who makes task timers ends up writing invoicing applications too. So the timer apps get bloated with client data and expense records and a bunch of features perfectly suited to freelance developers and designers who juggle a dozen clients at once — in fact those are the guys writing all these bloated timer apps. I just want to put time into a couple buckets so I don’t inadvertently work 12 hours a day (one of the risks of telecommuting).

I scanned a half-dozen timer apps, downloaded the two that seemed least likely to suck, and within moments eliminated both. Sigh.

Firefox had been giving me the spinning beach ball of doom for weeks, every time I downloaded a file. Whether a 5k GIF or 50MB FLAC, the browser hung for 30-40 seconds before finally popping the Downloads window open.

You’d think it would take a pretty serious computing challenge to redline two 2GHz G5 CPUs, but no — just try downloading some album art from Google Images. Apparently there is some kind of CPU-cooking fractal math in the progress-bar code in the Downloads window. Or maybe Firefox is calling into the SETI@home project on the sly, scanning a few parsecs of some remote slice of the universe for intelligible radio signals before ultimately beginning the admittedly pedestrian task of saving a few hundred bytes of image data to my hard drive.

Thanks go to Karl Pietri for suggesting I click the “clean up” button in the Downloads window. Erasing the past year’s worth of download history cut the download startup time from 30+ seconds to a reasonable .05 seconds.

More info, and a screenshot, can be found here: Firefox Download Clean Up

Stuck in the car last night, temporarily weary of hearing Octavarium (which incidentially is so good I haven’t taken the tape out of the car’s stereo since I put it in there), I channel-surfed through the FM spectrum to the first show I could pick up that wasn’t completely inane, although not by much as it turns out: “Gray Area” with Chris Daniel and Brad Giese on Free FM.

They were reading through Lindsay Lohan’s condolences to the Altman family following the death of filmmaker Robert Altman. She made a fractured mess of English grammar; she’s in desperate need of an editor, if not 8-12 years of grade-school education. My favorite line is her powerful closer, issued in all caps: “BE ADEQUITE.”

But the funniest part of the broadcast came when one of the hosts commented on Lohan’s “sense of eloquency.” That was either bitingly sarcastic or an astonishingly bad time for barbarism. Either way, I laughed aloud.

And then I queued up Octavarium again.

Answering the call (note: requires login) for slogan suggestions for deadelephant.org, I humbly submit:

(Click here if it doesn’t make sense.)

Update 2006-10-13: This Foley Family Values bumper sticker design is now available as a downloadable PDF; click the image.