Dave Mancuso dot Com

As we drove to day care today, I turned on Pink Floyd’s Animals album and played the “Pigs on the Wing (Part 2)” track.

“Listen, guys; do you hear that noise? What is it?”

“It’s pigs, Daddy!”

“Yep. This song has pig noises on it. Keep listening–they make pig sounds a few more times.”

(Two minutes later)

“Daddy, I hear the pigs again.”

“Yep, there they are, Drew.”

“Daddy?”

“Yes, Drew?”

“Are the pigs the ones making the music?”

Ars Technica has a great and humorous review of iTunes 4 (if you can get past the first page of Steve Jobs as a homeless man and the white on black text of the Ars Technica website).

One quote from the article:
“I pitted iTMS, without an Altivec-enhanced RDF unit, up against the evil that is P2P, which I had to download–talk about a shocker! They expect you to pay for it! Hard working authors of software that makes it possible to get other hard working authors’ work for free expect you to pay them. It is faith on a scale that surpasses Steve Jobs on his best Megahertz Myth making day. Setting aside the obvious argument that I have no intention of paying for something that helps me steal (infringe on copyrights), does it really make sense to turn over a credit card number to people who might suddenly find themselves with a court order to their head, demanding they turn over their customer list? Of course, I’m sure they’ll bite down on the fake tooth and fire off the electromagnetic shotgun at their servers on that terrible day. Sure.”

Mike and I passed our Apple Service Certification tests today. If we didn’t pass by the deadline, our employer would have lost its authorization as a Apple Self Servicing Provider. So it’s a good thing we made it through the three tests (desktop computers, portable computers, and operating systems support). It’s somewhat insane to take all three at once, but we had a plan. What was our plan? Um, to begin studying on Friday night and work through the weekend. There really wasn’t any earlier time to do it, and we knew the stuff, so the weekend was review and catch-up details.

Besides, if you look up “power-cramming for tests” in the dictionary, I’m pretty sure the definition lists my name in big gold letters…

From the Christian Science Monitor comes a girl’s diary of her piece of the Iraqi war. “[The twins] say the soldiers were nice and both are pleased with this happy meeting. Are they really nice? Nobody knows but God.”

The Profile (The Old Man of the Mountain) in New Hampshire crumbled and fell sometime in the past few nights (no one is sure when, because clouds covered it for much of the past few days). It was a naturally formed rock outcropping that looked like the craggy profile of a man’s face if you looked at it from the right angle.Franconia Notch was a great place to camp–I stayed there in 1994. The Profile was just rock, but it’s still a bit sad. The story is here.

We’ve been exploring timelines on the Internet recently for our teachers and students at work. There are some really cool ones, and I’m kind of getting into them. Tonight I found an excellent timeline of art history at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

The title above is from the book Ben and Jerry’s: The Inside Scoop. In the early days of their company, Ben and Jerry would occasionally need to fire people who just couldn’t do their jobs at all. So they would start saying to each other “The monster is hungry, The monster must eat.” That was the code that meant Ben was going into monster mode and letting someone go.

It means something different to me now. This blog is slowly growing into something of a monster itself, and it seems to need me to feed it words every day. Right now it’s lived on meals of “link posts” for a while, but it wants more war stories. It wants a lot of them. Some of the stories it wants are big. I have to chop these stories up into manageable sections though, or they’ll never get done. I hesitate to put some of these stories to words, since they cast some doubt on my relative sanity, but they all happened a long time ago and things have changed, right? Besides, I don’t think there’s really a question of my sanity–it’s been gone now for a long time. 😉 I think I’m out of time tonight, so I’ll have to start tomorrow. But it has to be soon: the monster is hungry, and the monster must eat.

My top nonfiction book would have to be Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. This book is a new journey each time I read it. Each time I pick up a little more of the Metaphysics of Quality. It’s a powerful book. I’m not sure if it completely ties together Western and Eastern philosophy as it claims, but it’s good stuff.

Turning on NPR as I drove back home from Lancaster today brought a breath of fresh air into the car. I immediately heard the familiar strains of Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon flowing through my speakers. NPR had a whole segment on the album. 30 years ago this week, Dark Side of the Moon reached Number One on the BillBoard charts. In fact, the album stayed on the BillBoard top 200 for 741 weeks. The runner-up in second place is a Johnny Mathis album from 1962 with about 400 weeks on the charts.

You can find the NPR story here. The sound samples on this page are great, including the Dark Side of the Moon/Wizard of Oz connection (I had forgotten about that until today–it’s kind of a sideways urban legend, or a–ahem–meme, if you will). By the way, for the guys in the office: the engineer on Dark Side of the Moon was none other than Alan Parsons.