As I read this, I was reminded of two quotes. The first is about the taste gap from Ira Glass:

Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it?s just not that good. It?s trying to be good, it has potential, but it?s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn?t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I?ve ever met. It?s gonna take awhile. It?s normal to take awhile. You?ve just gotta fight your way through.

THE GAP by Ira Glass

The second is from The Ze Frank Show:

For a very long time, taste and artistic training have been things that only a small number of people have been able to develop. Only a few people could afford to participate in the production of many types of media. Raw materials like pigments were expensive; same with tools like printing presses; even as late as 1963 it cost Charles Peignot over $600,000 to create and cut a single font family.

The small number of people who had access to these tools and resources created rules about what was good taste or bad taste. These designers started giving each other awards and the rules they followed became even more specific. All sorts of stuff about grids and sizes and color combinations ? lots of stuff that the consumers of this media never consciously noticed. Over the last 20 years, however, the cost of tools related to the authorship of media has plummeted. For very little money, anyone can create and distribute things like newsletters, or videos, or bad-ass tunes about "ugly."

Suddenly consumers are learning the language of these authorship tools. The fact that tons of people know names of fonts like Helvetica is weird! And when people start learning something new, they perceive the world around them differently. If you start learning how to play the guitar, suddenly the guitar stands out in all the music you listen to. For example, throughout most of the history of movies, the audience didn't really understand what a craft editing was. Now, as more and more people have access to things like iMovie, they begin to understand the manipulative power of editing. Watching reality TV almost becomes like a game as you try to second-guess how the editor is trying to manipulate you.

As people start learning and experimenting with these languages authorship, they don't necessarily follow the rules of good taste. This scares the shit out of designers.

the show with zefrank - 2006-07-14

I'm not sure what I make of all this.

; BNF per RFC-5234
expr	= factor *(op factor)
op	= '*'	; just the basic ops for now
	/ '/'	; adding more is just adding
	/ '+'	; them to this definition
	/ '-'
factor	=  literal
	/  var
	/  '(' expr ')'
literal	=  DIGIT+
var	=  (ALPHA / '_') (ALPHA / DIGIT / '_')*

When expressing this BNF via a recursive descent parser, the function handling expr is where the Shunting Yard algorithm is used, providing precedence handling. In my implementation, the function handling op returns the precedence and associativity from a table:

static struct optable const cops[] =
{
  [OP_EXP]  = { OP_EXP  , AS_RIGHT , 1000 } ,
  [OP_MUL]  = { OP_MUL  , AS_LEFT  ,  900 } ,
  [OP_DIV]  = { OP_DIV  , AS_LEFT  ,  900 } ,
  [OP_MOD]  = { OP_MOD  , AS_LEFT  ,  900 } ,
  [OP_ADD]  = { OP_ADD  , AS_LEFT  ,  800 } ,
  [OP_SUB]  = { OP_SUB  , AS_LEFT  ,  800 } ,
  [OP_SHL]  = { OP_SHL  , AS_LEFT  ,  700 } ,
  [OP_SHR]  = { OP_SHR  , AS_LEFT  ,  700 } ,
  [OP_BAND] = { OP_BAND , AS_LEFT  ,  600 } ,
  [OP_BEOR] = { OP_BEOR , AS_LEFT  ,  500 } ,
  [OP_BOR]  = { OP_BOR  , AS_LEFT  ,  400 } ,
  [OP_WORD] = { OP_WORD , AS_LEFT  ,  350 } ,
  [OP_NE]   = { OP_NE   , AS_LEFT  ,  300 } ,
  [OP_LT]   = { OP_LT   , AS_LEFT  ,  300 } ,
  [OP_LE]   = { OP_LE   , AS_LEFT  ,  300 } ,
  [OP_EQ]   = { OP_EQ   , AS_LEFT  ,  300 } ,
  [OP_GE]   = { OP_GE   , AS_LEFT  ,  300 } ,
  [OP_GT]   = { OP_GT   , AS_LEFT  ,  300 } ,
  [OP_LAND] = { OP_LAND , AS_LEFT  ,  200 } ,
  [OP_LOR]  = { OP_LOR  , AS_LEFT  ,  100 } ,
};

Adding a new operator is pretty easy. I was able to add the :: operator (OP_WORD) and slot it in (the expression a :: b is the same as a * 256 + b and is used extensively in my 6809 ANS Forth implementation).

The downside, the Shunting Yard algorithm doesn't handle unary operators very well. From what research I've done and a proof-of-concept I did, it can be done. Unary operators need to be right associative, but that's the easy part. It gets ugly with parsing?how to determine if ?-? is a subtraction binary operator or a unary negation operator, and where to place that code, and it has to go somewhere. I got it working. but it involved smearing the Shunting Yard algorithm into the op and factor functions in my case. And honesty, I don't think it's worth it just to get -3**2 to return -9 versus 9.

?You need to really smash that select button.?

?I am! See??

?Hmmm. Let me try ? oh. There you go.?

?The remote hates me!?

?It seems so.?

It was surprising because it was sent from my friend Lorie who currently lives in Pennsylvania, about the new Area Director for Toastmasters, which is funny, because I do not live in Pennsylvania, nor have I been involved with Toastmasters since the 5^th grade (ages 9?10 for non-US people). I wrote her back about this, and I received the following back:

Oh my word, I was trying to send to a different Toastmaster that was Sean Conner - and the email got confused - so sorry!

My God! The Internet is full of Sean Conners it seems!

And I use the iPhone for all the reasons that Chris does. But one aspect that Chris doesn't mention is the ability to change the alarm sound to prevent myself from being conditioned to ignore the alarm. I have two stories about an old alarm clock (of the type that you plug into the wall) that illustrate my being conditioned to an alarm.

Both of these happened in the mid-90s when I had been using the same alarm clock for maybe a decade at that point. The first was a dream. I was at work when my boss approached me. ?Baah baah baah baah baah baah,? he said. Nothing I said deterred him from his speech impediment. ?Baah baah baah baah baah baah.? He just would not shut up. It took a while for me to realize that my alarm clock was going off, and that I had incorporated the sound into my dream. ?Baah baah baah baah baah baah,? indeed.

For the second, I must explain that I had placed my alarm clock out of arms reach. In fact, I had placed it across the room, meaning that when I realized the alarm was going off, I would be forced to get out of bed to shut it off. But as I found out, that wasn't enougn.

There was one time when the alarm went off, ?baah baah baah baah baah baah,? I would roll out of bed, take the two steps to cross the room, slap the ?snooze? button, two steps back, roll back into bed. ?Baah baah baah baah baah baah.? Roll out of bed, two steps, slap, two steps, back to sleep.

For three hours!

At which point, the alarm clock said ?enough of this silliness,? and shut the alarm off itself. I am not proud to have learned this.

So yes, I still use the iPhone for an alarm clock, as when (and I think it's a matter of when) I become conditioned to the current alarm sound, I can change it.

But that still leaves one question?why does ?snooze? only last for nine minutes? The most plausible answer is one popular model did it that way. So there you go.