Weekend Cat Blogging: Talking and Heatwave

Luna is often quite talkative in the morning. Recently, she started launching into a long monologue while I had my iPhone handy to capture it.

Of course, she gets some scritches at the end. I am always curious what it is she is trying to say.

It has been quite warm the last few days in San Francisco, and CatSynth HQ always tends to run a bit hotter than its surroundings.

Luna tries to balance lying in the sun while trying to stay a bit cool in her fur suit.

Tomorrow (October 16) is National Feral Cat Day (who knew?).

Alley Cat Allies launched National Feral Cat Day on our 10th anniversary in 2001 to raise awareness about feral cats, promote Trap-Neuter-Return, and recognize the millions of compassionate Americans who care for them.

Events will be taking place around the United States to demonstrate compassion and support humane treatment of all cats. Follow the link to the map to see if there is an event near you. I also like the poster.

Weekend Cat Blogging #332 is hosted by Jules and Vincent at Judi’s Mind Over Matter. Jules is looking very Luna-like in his black-and-white portrait 🙂

The Carnival of the Cats will be up this Sunday at iMeowza.

Overpass (August 17, 2003)

Although I had driven this particular stretch of freeway through Las Gatos countless times, I did not recall seeing this particular overpass before. It was exceptionally tall, far taller than the other overpasses that I did remember; they were generally about fifteen feet above the freeway. It was a perfect black against the imperfect black of the night sky.

Weekend Cat Blogging: Luna and Apple

The influence of Apple and Steve Jobs extends deep into this site and into our lives at CatSynth HQ. For today’s Weekend Cat Blogging, we look at a few of the many photos of Luna with Apple computers and devices:

This last photo is one of our many taken with the Hipstamatic app on the iPhone.  Indeed, most of the photos, even those not taken with an iPhone, are processed on a MacBook or Mac Pro.  Nearly all of the writing is done on a MacBook, and occasionally on an iPad.  The technology of Apple has become ubiquitous, even down to blogs featuring cats.

Weekend Cat Blogging #331, is hosted by pam at Sidewalk Shoes, where Smudge says Happy Fall to everyone.

Carnival of the Cats will be up tomorrow at Meowsings of an Opinionated Pussycat.

And the Friday Ark is at the modulator.

Fun with Highways: Wall Street

Some streets take on a status beyond their physical extent. One of those is Wall Street, which is simultaneously an actual street in New York City, a neighborhood name, and shorthand for massive finance and investment industries of the United States.

Wall Street itself is quite short, and runs from South Street along the East River to Broadway. It’s terminus on the east side is underneath the South Street Viaduct (why a duck?) that carries the FDR drive to the tip of Manhattan and underneath Battery Park. The Broadway ends at historic Trinity Church. It is not a part of the city that I know particularly well. Most of my adventures don’t take me further south than Tribeca or the Brooklyn Bridge. It is interesting to look at the street names and arrangement, narrow streets with names like “Pine” and “Cedar”, “Front Street” and “Water Street” that we would associate with numerous coastal American cities and towns but not distinctly with New York (San Francisco has all four street names, as does Santa Cruz where I lived for several years). The streets are evidence of the long history in this part of the city.

The current #occupywallstreet protests are not actually centered on Wall Street, but in a park to the north along Liberty Street (officially named Zuccotti Park), just one big block away from the World Trade Center site and the new 9-11 Memorial. But things have grown since the initial encampment and march and while it was largely ignored by the mainstream media for the first couple of weeks or addressed as little more than a curiosity or object of derision. Now it appears in the news every day, and the protests themselves are growing organically. Here is an image yesterday from protesters occupying Foley Square, several blocks to the north near City Hall and the off-ramps from the Brooklyn Bridge (from the official website).

And a recent report of the massive march via Democracy Now!:

Towards the end of the video, one can see what happens as protesters approached the actual Wall Street.

If you want to support the movement but can’t make it to New York or one of the local “occupations” that have spread to other cities, you can send donations, or even order them a New York pizza courtesy of Liberatos Pizza. And we all know that New York pizza is better than what we get here on the west coast. They do recommend ordering vegetarian or vegan options, but the official “Occu-pie” looks suspiciously like pepperoni:

In the publication “Occupied Wall Street Journal”, they print a map of the plaza encampment:

I like how they label the sculpture on the plaza as “Weird Red Thing”. As reported in Hyperallergic, the “weird red thing” is actually Mark di Suvero’s “Joie de Vivre”. I quite like the sculpture, with its clean lines and curves, and red color against the grays of the Wall Street buildings.

[Photo by ElvertBarnes on flickr]

I will be visiting New York again in November, and I’m sure I will be downtown quite a bit…

NeXT

Like so many others, we are marking the passing of Steve Jobs. But one thing that is often overlooked in the many tributes is his leadership at NeXT.

I first came across NeXT in 1989, as I was starting to explore the world of computer music. It was an ideal machine for its time for music and media work. It had a powerful operating system, it had a programmable DSP, it had SoundKit and MusicKit libraries specifically designed for music programming. And the original NeXT Cube was quite a striking physical object.

I had even written a couple of letters and formal research proposals to NeXT and directly to Steve Jobs to support my incipient research work in high school. Of course, nothing came of it, but it was an interesting exercise in learning how to write a proposal. And my opportunities to try out the system (via various institutions) game me a sense of what a more ideal computing environment could be like. As a music and computer-science student at Yale, I did in fact have the opportunity to do work on NeXT systems, but by that point the computing world, and the computer-music world, were moving on.

Apple acquired NeXT in late 1996. In the process, they reacquired Steve Jobs, whose return marked the Apple that we know today, and also the NeXTSTEP operating system, which lives on to this day as the foundation of Mac OSX. Every contemporary MacBook and MacPro is in many ways a late model NeXT computer. Indeed, it was only after the introduction of OSX that I purchased my first Mac (an iBook) in 2003 and gradually shifted into being one of those annoyingly obsessive Mac/iPhone/iPad users. All of my music and photography work is done on these devices, as are all posts to this blog and updates to our Twitter and Facebook streams. Even my day job is intimately connected to the technology from Apple. We associate these technologies and designs with Steve Jobs, but much of it can be traced back to what he and others pioneered at NeXT.