Month: December 2021

‘Bad Company’ by the Group Bad Company, from the Album ‘Bad Company’ – Lost Art Press

‘Bad Company’ by the Group Bad Company, from the Album ‘Bad Company’ – Lost Art Press:

Two lessons: Big business will try to bully you. They will try to decide when to pay you. They will decide how your pricing should work. They will ask for special treatment compared to your smaller customers.

Don’t give in. Once you start treating your customers differently, you are in for a world of drama and deceit. Whenever we get asked for special treatment, I simply remember what Jennie Alexander always said: “’No’ is a complete sentence.”

The second lesson: Pay your vendors on the day you get their invoice. When someone drops off work they did for us, they leave with a check. When an invoice arrives, John pays it the same day.

Vendors remember this. And if you’ve wondered how we kept so many of our products in stock during the pandemic shortages, you now have your answer.

These folks are such a pleasure to deal with, and they produce (and write) some of the best works in the field. The books themselves are a joy, beautifully designed, printed and bound. I must repeat this line… it’s so important! “Jennie Alexander always said: “’No’ is a complete sentence.”

Say Yes: Mel Brooks at 95

Say Yes: Mel Brooks at 95:

I’d learned one very simple trick: say yes. Simply say yes. Like Joseph E. Levine, on “The Producers,” said, “The curly-haired guy—he’s funny looking. Fire him.” He wanted me to fire Gene Wilder. And I said, “Yes, he’s gone. I’m firing him.” I never did. But he forgot. After the screening of “Blazing Saddles,” the head of Warner Bros. threw me into the manager’s office, gave me a legal pad and a pencil, and gave me maybe twenty notes. He would have changed “Blazing Saddles” from a daring, funny, crazy picture to a stultified, dull, dusty old Western. He said, “No farting.” I said, “It’s out”… You say yes, and you never do it.

This seems like quite the win as a life hack…

Piping stdout and stderr to Preview

Piping stdout and stderr to Preview:

A while back, I wrote about how handy it was to redirect a man page into Preview. This allows you to keep the man page open, search it, and generally have a better user experience than struggling with more (or less) to navigate through the information provided there.

man -t apropos | open -fa Preview

Recently, someone asked me about more modern command line interaction, specifically, commands that use --help or similar to provide their documentation. Could that information be opened in Preview as well.

So I put on my thinking hat and set to work.

Git better with fzf and Fish

Git better with fzf and Fish:

You’ve probably heard me mention fzf before. It’s an amazing command line tool created by Junegunn Choi. It takes a list of data and turns it into a command line menu with fuzzy searching, multi-select, and can even preview each item in whatever way is appropriate. I’ve been using it in all kinds of scripts — where I used to have rudimentary numbered menus, I now have much friendlier and more flexible terminal navigation.

fzf is available via Homebrew, just run brew install fzf. See man fzf for very good documentation.

Does Kenny G Make Good Music?

Does Kenny G Make Good Music? | The New Yorker:

Perhaps his most outspoken critic is the jazz guitarist Pat Metheny, who once referred to Gorelick’s work as “lame-ass, jive, pseudo bluesy, out-of-tune, noodling, wimped out, fucked up playing,” and described Gorelick’s version of Louis Armstrong’s “What a Wonderful World” as “a new low point in modern culture—something that we all should be totally embarrassed about—and afraid of.”

Regardless of what you think of Kenny G or Pat Metheny, I greatly appreciate an honest opinion. So much of the interactions I witness have pulled punches and unsaid truths because it won’t do to upset the apple cart. You don’t have to be mean or rude. But once you’ve lost the impact and core what you mean to say, you might as well say nothing…because that’s the end result. All your words wind up being meaningless. The above is not new, it happened years ago. But it was refreshing to run across it in what I thought was going to be a half a puff piece promoting the new film. Nice!