Before Robert Shaw's Quint, a cracker was a bland cake of baked flour only good as a surface to hold peanut butter or cheese, but not after. Quint elevated the cracker into the snack of sailors and shark hunters. What man has not wanted to calmly snap chunks of a cracker while saying the words:

Y'all know me. Know how I earn a livin'. I'll catch this bird for you, but it ain't gonna be easy. Bad fish! Not like going down to the pond and chasing bluegills and tommycocks. This shark, swallow you whole. No shakin', no tenderizin', down you go.

Much like the Eucharist is a symbol of Christ in the Catholic tradition, in Jaws, the cracker forms the edible representation of the salty trinity: Quint, the shark and the sea. This metaphor is emphasized both in the cracker eating scene by the having Quint consume the cracker as part of his performance before the 'congregation' of islanders while sitting in front of an effigy of the shark and then finally in Quint's death scene where Quint, arms splayed as on a cross, is half in the sharks mouth as it slide back into the water thus merging the trinity.

Over the coming Fourth of July weekend, enjoy a cracker or two, swim in the ocean (but avoid the sharks) and remember the most influential cracker eater of all time, Robert Shaw.

Happy Fourth everyone.

On a related note, according to this guy, because I've mentioned Joyce and Ulysses I'm an official AFPM - Artsy-Fartsy-Pretentious-Mofo. Luckily the same exclusion that applied to him applies to me (a friendly responder gives him a pass because he drinks Miller from the can).

Man at bar: What can you give me for some shattered nerves, the inside meemies, the jitters...
Mr Sousse : Joe, if the gentleman has some butterflies in his stomach I suggest a dash of rover in it.
Man: Rover?
Mr Sousse: Dog...Absinth...It's very good for the nerves...
(Man then proceeds to down a large glass much to the amazement of Mr Sousse (W.C.) and Joe the bartender (Shemp Howard))

The way I've been dealing with this in my own music catalog is to ignore the default CDDB categorization and set genres into very broad buckets: Rock, Jazz, Classical, Country. I then use the Grouping field to add a comma separated list of qualifiers to the base genre: alt, jazz, jam, live, blues, that further describe the music.

I'll give you a couple examples. In my library, all of Neil Young's songs are categorized as Rock genre, but they have various grouping keywords: Country, Grunge, Folk, Live, depending on the work. Something genre bending like Gov't Mule might also be placed in the Rock category but then have grouping keywords such as: Southern, Blues and Jam applied.

Given the current music player's support for grouping beyond Genre, this isn't a perfect solution. I can create playlists that select from the grouping field, but I cannot sort by the keywords or list the albums that way. While that's not a huge deal, it still rather annoying.

Deliver unprecedented productivity through a compelling, activity-based user interface

The second bullet item was also interesting, but for a different reason.

Introduce a new class of "composite" applications; delivering innovation by extending Notes applications in unison with a J2EE-based platform of packaged and custom applications

Perhaps I'm wrong, but this sounds a lot like the original 'Garnet' value proposition that was unceremoniously canned a few years ago.

Is all this a tacit admission that they goofed on both Garnet and Workplace?

1. The Port of Long Beach is HUGE. If you like watching ships, like I do, this place is awesome. I also understand the security issue posed by the volume of containers passing through a large port, a lot better, after actually seeing the number of containers first hand.

2. The highways in the L.A. area are filthy compared to the those in the North East. I recommend a convict work release program or something.

3. The new '05 Mustang convertible rocks. I only wish our rental version had had the V8.

4. Flying Jet Blue from Boston to Long Beach is a great way to cross the country.

One of the cool things Iris management team did when they opened up the new building 5 in Westford, was form small decorating teams to pick art and furniture for the hallways and lounge areas. Given the broad range of tastes within Iris each hallway ended up with a very different look.

One hallway near my office, at the time, was lined with prints from the painter Gerhard Richter. Richter is a painter with a mixed reputation. Some people love him, some hate him and many people don't even recognize he's a painter, since many of his most famous paintings are photorealistic. I was ambivalent at first but he grew on me.

Anyway, as I was thinking about Gerhard Richter the name of the person who picked his painting for this particular hallway popped into my head: Eric LoPresti. Eric was a UI designer and budding artist who's among other things, designed and drew the keychain/key spinner for the Notes 5.0 login dialog. Soon after that contribution, Eric left Iris to pursue other interests - a fine arts degree, I recall.

Just for a lark I decided to Google Eric's name and see if I could find what he's up to. Well I can't be certain, since there's no picture, but it appears Eric just won the 2005 William and Dorothy Yeck Award, for young painters, with a set of photorealistic paintings of cords. Given the name, the tie-in with Richter's style and the fact that a computer guy would have a ample supply of cords around, I think it's a good bet.

Congratulations to Eric. Those are some cool paintings.

pero como se puede ser tan bocas, el rey del blog, anda chaval vete a tu casa y antes de hablar informate un poquito. Con gente como tu no hacen falta mas humanos, bueno en tuccaso si , para meterte con ellos. Saludos Gañan.

The Google translation is:

but as it is possible so to be mouths, the king of blog, walks chaval vetoes to your house and before speaking informate just a little bit. With human people as your they do not make lack but, good in tuccaso if, for meterte with them. Gañan greetings.

If I had to guess from the text above I wouldn't say the person was congratulating me on a fine post. But then again, this could be nonesense in Spanish too. If anyone can help with the translation I would appreciate it.

The opening act was Xavier Rudd. I can’t say much about his performance, as I was busy enjoying a couple of pre-show beers and slices of Pizza, but he has a cool bluesy sound enhanced with traditional Australian Aboriginal didjeridu.

With a couple of beers down, Don and I headed to our seats to watch Robert Randolph and The Family band. (Our seats were amazing – 15 rows back, center stage, right next to the tapers. Awesome.) Robert Randolph is a great pedal steel guitar player and he and the Family Band ripped through some blazing rocks and blues tunes. I had never heard of Robert Randolph before but I plan to pick up at least one of his CD. He’s a passionate and electric roots rock and blues player. If you ever get a chance to see him and his band, don’t pass it up, they are fun and smokin’ hot.

Mule came on around 9:00. I can’t recall the exact set list (there was a lot of herbal smoke in the air) but it was a good mix of Mule’s blues and rock tunes. The second set opened up with a few verses of a rather slow gospel like piece that left everyone relaxing in their seats, but this was just a short ruse before Mule transitioned into a blazing and crowd please rendition of Warren’s most famous song from his Allman Brother’s recordings, Soul Shine. Other notable rockers included Larger than Life, Mule, Lola Leave Your Light On, Thorazine Shuffle, Slackjaw Jezebel, Sam and John The Revelator.

For the encores Robert Randolph joined Mule on stage and they rocked through some more great tunes. At this point the effect of the kids in front of us passing around their tenth (not an exageration) 'herbal cigarette' must have really been getting to me because I can't for the life of me remember which songs they played. The light show was pretty fantastic however.

I can't wait until Mule comes around again. I wont pass up the chance to see them in the future.

In his post Michael mentions a question he didn't ask when he attended a recent Kubi Web seminar: "What is your reaction to Julio Estrada (who was the founder and original lead architect at Kubi) leaving the company to work on the Microsoft Exchange team?". I can't answer that for the corporation but on a personal level I was saddened when Julio told me of his decision to leave but I can also tell you I was satisfied with his explanation and it didn't effect my decision to leave IBM and join Kubi.

Given that the original question was rather leading, I'll turn it around and ask this: What is your reaction to a senior developer/architect and original member of Workplace product team (me) leaving IBM to work at Kubi Software? My guess is you would say, you're only one person, products are built by teams. I think the same holds true.

I've never liked this law, it always seemed like an unnecessary invasion of privacy and personal freedom. Pursuant to understanding how this all came about and it's legal foundation I went looking for some data on the web. Here are a few articles I found:

Addressing Issues: Personal Freedom
The Fraud of Seat-Belt Laws

While I now understand the issues on both sides better, personally, I would rather see my tax dollars spent on something else.