Chad Comello

Browse eternal, shiny and not Chrome

Last month I got fed up with the constant whirring of my MacBook Pro’s fan, and its consistent slowness generally, so I tried a few things to try to improve it.

One was quitting iTunes when I wasn’t using it, and the other was quitting Chrome and using Firefox instead. I don’t know if only one or both of these things made the difference, but the whirring stopped immediately and the computer sped up significantly.

I’ve been a dedicated Chrome user since it was released 10 years ago. Initially I liked its clean interface and single-bar searching. Since I was already a dedicated Gmail and Google Calendar user, it just made sense. (Anything to avoid Internet Explorer.)

But based on this experience, there’s really no reason for me to go back to Chrome. Its privacy concerns alone warrant pursuing other options, though I’m still happy to use Gmail, Calendar, and Google Drive because at least they provide consistent and practical service without chewing up my CPU.

(Post title for the Mad Max: Fury Road fans out there.)

Today in audiobook opinions

June 16, 2018 / Chad / 0 Comments

“Is listening to an audiobook the same as reading?”

Neurologically, no, but it still counts as reading a book, and is often better than merely reading one.

“Portrait of the Voice in My Head”

Great profile of “golden-throated” audiobook narrator Grover Gardner and the booming audiobook industry:

Gardner’s advice to aspiring narrators is to take a digital recorder and a book, sit in a quiet room, and read aloud for an hour without stopping. “Then tell me if you still want to do it. The answer is often ‘no,’ ” he says. “If you had to break down all the components of what goes into quality audiobook narration, it’s staggering. All the things you’re juggling in your head, in the body, in your throat and your voice.

I never recognize audiobook narrators, but I always respect their art.

My totally uninformed bandwagon World Cup 2018 teams

June 14, 2018 / Chad / 0 Comments

Despite having played soccer for 10 years, I’ve never got into watching the pros, except for the World Cup. Like the Olympics, once it arrives I watch whatever is on basic TV and hope for good sporting.

Here are my totally uninformed bandwagon picks for the 2018 World Cup:

Colombia, for my time there in 2010.

Iceland, for my Scandinavian side.

Sweden, for my part-Swedish wife’s sake, and because Finland isn’t an option.

I’m with “Stupid With Love”

June 13, 2018 / Chad / 0 Comments

I have listened to the Original Broadway Cast Recording of the Mean Girls musical (on Hoopla—free with your library card) and have determined, without having seen the show, that the best song is “Stupid With Love.”

My home screen

June 12, 2018 / Chad / 1 Comment

I’m always intrigued by other people’s smartphone home screens. Which apps make the dock? How is everything organized, if at all? Do they have 10,000+ unread emails like a crazy person?

Here’s mine for you to judge:

Messages, Podcasts, Google Maps, Safari, and WordPress are probably the most used. Safari used to be in the dock until I decided I was using it too much. You’ll notice no app badges because I turned all of them off (except Messages and Phone). Snapchat is the only social media app I have, for the sole purpose of seeing pictures of my nephew. And I use the black background for the lock screen and home screen to make the phone as boring as possible.

Steve Miller Band and “chocolate cake” rock

June 11, 2018 / Chad / 2 Comments

This is a great profile of Steve Miller of the Steve Miller Band, written by musician Max Marshall, whom Miller befriended as a middle schooler and has mentored ever since. In one part Marshall describes the enduring appeal of Miller’s music:

To a lot of Steve Miller Band fans, the seventies hits are like “chocolate cake.” They’re warm and pleasurable comfort food, reminiscent of a Summer of ’76 picnic. They’re rock without the chaos, the blues without the pain, an America with the freedom of an endless road trip.

That’s exactly right. Though I was born long after the Steve Miller Band and his contemporaries were popular, growing up with 94.9 WOLX in Madison helped introduce me to all the good stuff long before I even knew which bands wrote which songs.

More recently I’ve started compiling a list of the songs that—at least for me—fit into that “chocolate cake” vein. Ranging from pop to rock to country, their strong hooks and smooth rhythms are perfect for long summer days and windows-down road trips. (My wife, to my shame, is not a fan, so I usually have to save it for solo driving.)

For a long time I couldn’t figure out a good name for this subgenre, but chocolate cake rock works for me. Suggestions for further additions welcome:

“Take the Money and Run” – Steve Miller Band
“Danny’s Song” – Loggins & Messina
“Dance With Me” – Orleans
“Running On Empty” – Jackson Browne
“Ramblin Man” – Allman Brothers
“Rich Girl” – Hall & Oates
“Come and Get Your Love” – Redbone
“The Weight” – The Band
“Amie” – Pure Prairie League
“Reelin’ in the Years” – Steely Dan
“Lake Shore Drive” – Aliotta Haynes Jeremiah
“I Just Want to Celebrate” – Rare Earth
“Brandy” – Looking Glass
“Time in a Bottle” – Jim Croce

Summer assignment: visit your local library

June 8, 2018 / Chad / 0 Comments

Despite their great intentions, those “required reading” lists of books make me cringe. Required reading usually feels like work, whether they’re from a friend, a professor, or a stranger on the internet. Pleasure reading should be based on freedom and empowerment and whim, not compulsion. Use those lists as a resource, sure, but don’t feel obliged to them.

Austin Kleon gets it right by assigning not a specific book, but a way to get one:

Visit your local library and apply for a library card. (Or pay your fines and renew.)
Ask a librarian for a tour of the library building, the online catalog, and the digital holdings. Ask the librarian to show you how to put materials on hold, how to request materials for purchase, and how to use interlibrary loan.
Check out at least one item. (So you have to return.)

My #4: Don’t be afraid to ask questions. You’re not bothering librarians by doing so. It’s why we’re there!

I can’t tell you how beneficial these would be to you and your kids, and how happy this would make your librarians. Summer is the perfect time too; most libraries have summer reading programs for kids and adults, with prizes and fun activities.

Happy reading!

Atlas of a Lost World

June 7, 2018 / Chad / 1 Comment

We think of ourselves as different from other animals. We extol our own tool use, congratulate our sentience, but our needs are the same. We are creatures on a planet looking for a way ahead. Why do we like vistas? Why are pullouts drawn on the sides of highways, signs with arrows showing where to stand for the best view? The love for the panorama comes from memory, the earliest form of cartography, a sense of location. Little feels better than knowing where you are, and having a reason to be there.

— from Atlas of a Lost World: Travels in Ice Age America by Craig Childs, a meaty and winding travelogue around North America investigating notable Pleistocene spots, like the Bering land bridge in Alaska and the woolly mammoth remains in Clovis, New Mexico.

I recently realized how fascinated I am with prehistoric people and their times: What was life like back then? How similar were Ice Age humans to us? Childs goes a long way in finding out, hiking through tundra and camping out in a polar vortex and trudging through Floridian swamps. Archaeology, anthropology, sociology, mythology, and philosophy all come into play.

“Science is useful,” he writes. “It fills in the blanks with precision, but history is ultimately more about stories and the unfolding of human whims.”

The story of a star

June 5, 2018 / Chad / 0 Comments

This was a star that had left behind the fiery extravagances of its youth, had raced through the violets and blues and greens of the spectrum in a few fleeting billions of years, and now had settled down to a peaceful maturity of unimaginable length. All that had gone before was not a thousandth of what was yet to come; the story of this star had barely begun.

― Arthur C. Clarke, 2001: A Space Odyssey

I wish I’d read Clarke’s book before rewatching Stanley Kubrick’s film adaptation (in 70mm at the Music Box in Chicago). It would have filled in a lot of context for the famously opaque film. For understanding how the film got made I highly recommend Michael Benson’s Space Odyssey: Stanley Kubrick, Arthur C. Clarke, and the Making of a Masterpiece.

For the records

June 4, 2018 / Chad / 0 Comments

Dan Cohen ponders why some recent sci-fi films prominently feature libraries, archives, and museums:

Ever since Jyn Erso and Cassian Andor extracted the Death Star plans from a digital repository on the planet Scarif in Rogue One, libraries, archives, and museums have played an important role in tentpole science fiction films. From Luke Skywalker’s library of Jedi wisdom books in The Last Jedi, to Blade Runner 2049’s multiple storage media for DNA sequences, to a fateful scene in an ethnographic museum in Black Panther, the imposing and evocative halls of cultural heritage organizations have been in the foreground of the imagined future. …

… At the same time that these movies portray an imagined future, they are also exploring our current anxiety about the past and how it is stored; how we simultaneously wish to leave the past behind, and how it may also be impossible to shake it. They indicate that we live in an age that has an extremely strained relationship with history itself. These films are processing that anxiety on Hollywood’s big screen at a time when our small screens, social media, and browser histories document and preserve so much of we do and say.

Ready Player One is another recent example. And let’s give some love to the historical society in Back to the Future Part III. Read the rest here.