011: Interview: Peter Hughes | The Merlin Show

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In today's episode, Merlin talks with Peter Hughes of The Mountain Goats about the logistics of wired touring, keeping a tour diary on LiveJournal, and why The Mountain Goats don't have a MySpace page.

More links and info in show notes.

Slow Down, Multitaskers, and Don’t Read in Traffic - New York Times

Yesterday's New York Times front page ran an article pulling together the results of several recent studies looking at how interruptions and attempts to multitask can affect the quality of work as well as the length of recovery time.

Here's one bit that really grabbed me:

In a recent study, a group of Microsoft workers took, on average, 15 minutes to return to serious mental tasks, like writing reports or computer code, after responding to incoming e-mail or instant messages. They strayed off to reply to other messages or browse news, sports or entertainment Web sites.

“I was surprised by how easily people were distracted and how long it took them to get back to the task,” said Eric Horvitz, a Microsoft research scientist and co-author, with Shamsi Iqbal of the University of Illinois, of a paper on the study that will be presented next month.

And, from a PDF of another of the studies cited ("Isolation of a Central Bottleneck of Information Processing with Time-Resolved fMRI"), here's a telling snippet from the article's abstract (yes, most of the rest of it is well over my head):

Since the new TV can handle video up to HD's 720p resolution, there's been a lot of speculation about whether the iTunes store will eventually start selling HD content, such as TV shows and movies. You can bet that the desire for that quality of presentation is theoretically out there (at least it is for this HD TV owner). The problem, as many folks have discussed at length, is that the file size for HD movies, in particular, may be prohibitively large for the garden-variety home broadband user.

As Greg Keene notes, "With simple math, we can extrapolate that a 2-hour movie would be about 3.9 GB." That's not only a substantially lengthy download for, say, a residential DSL subscriber, it also represents the investment of over 10% of the available space on the Apple TV's drive (as well as, it should be noted, an equivalent chunk of space back on your Mac or PC's disk).

Lower threshold links to stuff I wouldn't want you to miss. It's been quite a while since we've done some shorties, so what the heck.

• Inquisitor 3. Spotlight for the web. - I tried Inquisitor when it first came out, and, for some reason, it didn't move me. But now, I love its smartypants, mind-reader replacement for Safari's search bar. Sogudi is still my first love for ad hoc location bar searches, but the ability to add custom search engines to Inquisitor is hot hot hot. Free as in beer, too.
• Picked up one of these Behance notebooks the other day. It is very lovely and well-designed. Not sure if it's a quantum functional improvement over a sheet of printer paper, but it's definitely a classy piece of productivity pr0n. And the Helvetica! Ah the Helvetica.
• Service Scrubber - I've mentioned before that I think OS X Services are one of the most woefully under-utilized tricks in the current Apple world. But the actual Services menu can, over time get cluttered. This handy little donationware app will shut off Services you don't want to appear in the menu and let you re-map the key bindings of ones you do use. Very handy.
• 010: Interview: John Vanderslice, Part 2 | The Merlin Show - John Vanderslice on high-volume email: "You can't make sense of all that correspondence. You just can't."
• On the advice of my pal Katie Spence, I picked up Unstuck, which looks to be a pretty neat little book about generating ideas and then seeing them through into real "stuff." Presented in a "choose your own adventure" style that makes for interactive fun. They also have a website that (with a bit of typo-correction and expansion) could turn into an excellent adjunct to the hardback edition (the book clearly wants to be hypertext).
• Gizmodo reports on less costly options for hooking up your new Apple TV. My take: A) it's crazy for Apple not to include at least gratis composite cables for a device aimed at the fat part of the media-viewing curve, and B) the charlatans at Monster and their ilk should be horsewhipped for what they're charging media noobs for cables.

009: Interview: Jeffrey Veen, Part 2 | The Merlin Show