The thinning ranks
The Blazers' already depleted roster was even thinner Saturday at practice as guard Juan Dixon, forward/center Brian Skinner and center...
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March 11, 2006
Pragmatic Rails Studio Comes to Portland
Mike Clark and Dave Thomas are bringing the Rails Studio to the Pacific Northwest. This is an excellent chance for anybody in this neck of the woods to get their hands deep into Rails. As well, if you're looking to check out a Rails Studio but aren't in this part of the country, come on out! Portland is a great city to visit and we've got lots to see and do. [link]
Aperture at ETech
4 days. Over 1200 people. Over 2000 images. Over 25GB of Data. 160 images posted to Flickr. 2 camera bodies. 3 flashes. 4 memory cards. 1 dual-core G5. Those are just a few of the statistics behind last week's photo shoot at ETech. But, more significant for me beyond the numbers is—now that I've been shooting the O'Reilly conferences for a year—how my tools have changed. The biggest tool changes have been in post-production. I've used several different workflows and found problems with all of them. All the while while suffering through broken workflows, I played around with thoughts of how to make the things better. And then, as a huge fall surprise, Apple provided what looked, at least on paper, like just the ticket the form of Aperture. [essay]
Understanding Infrastructure
If you want to understand the secret lives of cities, you have to look at the infrastructure that supports them. Infrastructure may not exactly be urban destiny, but the sunk costs we've invested in roads, sewers, pipes and wires exert tremendous influence over the kinds of urban innovations (like smart grids) we in the developed world can, in any realistic way, adopt. In other ways, the lack of established infrastructure in developing world cities both restrains and enables new possibilities.
One of the barriers to change here is that infrastructure is often hidden from our eyes, by choice or inattention. Because of this, resources which open our eyes to the systems which support us are inherently worldchanging. Explaining infrastructure is a form of making visible the invisible.
Geoff Manaugh has posted two excellent pieces illuminating New York's water system and the (heavily engineered)workings of the San Francisco Bay. I've been the San Francisco Bay Hydrological Model he profiles in the second post, and, while I am admittedly a geek for this stuff, I found it both riveting and revealing in a way that many digital tools sometimes are not. GIS-based mapping is obviously a wonderful tool for grokking systems, but there's something about physical models which appeals in a deeply visceral way.
Both posts are worth reading. Any other suggestions for insightful explorations of urban infrastructure?
(Posted by Alex Steffen in Pulling Back the Curtain – Information and Knowledge Resources at 06:53 PM)
KartMatch
Ning-powered app for finding other Mario Kart friendcodes. Fun!
Your Home: Wireless Web Access for Every Tenant
If a hotel can offer customers wireless Internet access, why can't co-ops and condominiums?
stamen design | beautiful things that build themselves
another proj from friends at stamen
Whitney Biennial PreReview No. 2
AFC sez, about the current Whitney Biennial:It's hard to get past the feeling that rather than examining current trends, Biennial curators Chrissie Ilse and Philippe Vergne began with a set of concerns they were interested in and then sought out artists who met those interests. There's nothing necessarily wrong with this, but it does strike me as an intensely egotistical practice to be making the claim that contemporary art making is about the things you happen to be interested in. Old school political activism is not the pulse of nation.Hear, hear. No, I still haven't seen the show--take this for what it's worth as a preReview. An artist friend who had a frustrating studio visit from Vergne and Iles reports that they didn't look with their eyes, or even their ears, but with their mouths. And what is it with Europeans and the fucking spirit of '68? Catherine David took that same tack with Documenta a while back. Yes, a wild liberating time for young Parisians, running wild in the streets, believing for a few moments in the possibility of universal socialism---GET OVER IT! I mean, Deep Dish TV? As much of their politics as I might agree with, what they do isn't art, it's political activist media. This is like Larry Rinder touching Rural Studio with the curatorial magic wand a few years ago and saying "I have the power to make you an artist." It's just not fair to people who do art 24/7 and deserve some comprehension. OK, I will shut up until I see the show. We're quibbling about the themes and the people, not the work.
Despite impressive resumes, having heard Ilse and Vergne speak I find it hard to believe the curators had a real understanding of what inspired the work they managed to find. The most engaging art in the show often used recycled imagery, or constructed fictional narratives, and the curators forward increased travel as the explanation for this phenomenon. I guess artists with nominal pre-Whitney success are making a lot more money than I knew, because I just assumed travel was as much a credit risk to these people as it is to me.
85% of U.S. troops in Iraq said the U.S. mission is mainly “to retaliate for Saddam’s role in the 9-11 attacksâ€
85% of U.S. troops in Iraq said the U.S. mission is mainly “to retaliate for Saddam’s role in the 9-11 attacks”. Says a survey of 944 military personnel in January and February 2006.
SXSW2006 Panel
I'm on a panel on quitting work and getting your own thing going later today (Saturday @ 5PM). Hopefully, I'll have some insightful contributions to make. We have a site for the panel where we've gathered some links and will be putting up info.
How to pitch an idea [del.icio.us]
"This essay provides a primer on idea pitches, and although most of my experience is in the tech-sector, I pitch to you that the advice here will be relevant to pitching business plans, yourself (e.g. job interviews), screenplays, or anything else."
American Express - Small Business Information [del.icio.us]
A nuts and bolts guide and some tools for helping to start a small business
Street Art Exhibition This Week in Slovenia
Next week the first ever international streetart exhibition will open in Slovenia. It features a terrific group of artists from around the world including Space Invader from France, Flying Fortress from Germany, M-city from Poland, and The London Police from the Netherlands. The local Coatian artists will include Filjio & Kenova and the Slovene artists Lele, Rone84, Ioke42, Sektion 1.3, Tacek, Zek Advance, Skrana, Ratt One and Ash. Click here for more info.
Mega Floppy 2006
great floppy RAD array. brilliant!
March 10, 2006
Top Model For Sale
This parody clip of "America's Next Top Model" is from Product Invasion, an effort by the WGA to protest product placement. (PRODUCTINVASION.COM)
Webmonkey's Interview with Shawn O'Keefe
SXSW Interactive
The 2006 edition of SXSW Interactive takes place in Austin, Texas from March 10th to March 14th. The conference and festival, which focuses primarily on technology and the web, runs along side the SXSW Film festival. On the 15th, the day after the interactive conference ends, central Texas turns into the hottest music spot on earth as over 1300 bands from all over the world descend upon Austin for the SXSW Music festival.
Webmonkey's Bryan Zilar recently sat down with Shawn O'Keefe, Festival Coordinator of SXSW Interactive. They discussed the different ways that the emergence of new technologies such as online film distribution, digital communities, blogs and videoblogs are changing the face of SXSW. Shawn also told us about some of the Web 2.0 collaboration tools [Jambo] that the festival organizers have employed to help build a stronger sense of community among the conference participants. And finally, Shawn sheds some light on the mysterious gathering known as Nuclear Taco Night. This Webmonkey Q&A is also available as a podcast (8.1MB MP3).
The Annals of Journalism
Bryan Chaffin, editor of The Mac Observer: “I personally do not view Think Secret as a rumor site. I believe that they follow standard journalistic practices — that they double-source information. I think, as a matter of fact, they do, in terms of journalism, some of the best work in the Mac web.”
Justin Hall's Backchannel
"In the Interactive Media Division at the University of Southern California's School of Cinema-Television, we experimented to find ways networked communication could augment and amplify the content of classroom education, promoting collaborative processing and retention."
Symbol of Abu Ghraib Seeks to Spare Others His Nightmare
Ali Shalal Qaissi tells the story behind the scandalous picture of him hooded atop a box and attached to wires.
blowupdoll
Another guy addicted to French female singers of the 60s.
La Laque
I am a little addicted to the three songs of theirs that I have. When will they come out with a full-length album?
mny1tiu
My dreams are answered
Originally uploaded by david.I like to watch The Wire, Deadwood and whatever's playing on New York 1. Customers of Time Warner Cable can now get NY1 on demand, as if it wasn't already convenient enough that they replay every story every hour.
Anil jokingly calls NY1 "The Subway Strike Channel." I'm not laughing! As gothamist and others (including the New York Times, but behind their paywall) noted, NY1's strike coverage was unrivaled. If they offered a "Best of the 2005 Subway Strike Coverage" DVD for $30, I'd buy it. I am hoping for another strike this year, even though I know that's impossible, just so NY1 can cover it again.
yeah, we really need another 247 recoloured Kubricks
The task of bringing hundreds more crappy redundant themes to the masses has been taken on by some Malaysian guy named Justin. Woo! He cleverly deals with the problems of all previous contests by keeping all the themes secret until after the competition. Genius. This way, he avoids bandwidth trouble (they’re all getting handed over to themes.wordpress.net when it’s all over, which is much better than establishing yet another repository) and all the post-result comments saying ‘WTF, why did that piece of shit win when this one is obviously sooooo much better, whoever your judges are they clearly don’t know shit about design’ etc. etc.
(Well, ok, they’re still going to get the post-result comments. If your judges were competent to judge a design competition then you wouldn’t be ashamed to announce who they were.)
There are, of course, no lists of criteria by which the prizes will be judged, and no requirement that themes be out-of-box XHTML and CSS-valid, include all necessary plugin hooks, be i18n-ready, include documentation and have authors willing to provide support. So, once more, we’ll be getting a deluge of crappy inadequate themes rather than a sensible number of decent ones. Joy.
functions.php is a nice thing, though, so I may re-style an old template and bung it their way. Hell, if this piece of migraine-inducing junk could win two awards in the last contest, anything’s worth a go.
What Not to Do [del.icio.us]
A seasoned entrepreneur reveals the 17 most common mistakes startups make and how to avoid them -- plus, the 5 things you must do to ensure success.
email content visualization
an impressive data visualization technique that portrays relationships using the interaction histories preserved in email archives. using the content of exchanged messages, 'themail' displays the key words that characterize one’s correspondence with an individual & how they change over the time period of the relationship.
'yearly words' (large faint words) show up in the background, whereas 'monthly words' (columns of yellow words) appear in the foreground. in many cases, keywords change sharply from a month column to the next, exposing the ever-changing nature of people’s conversations. see also email mountain.
[ibm.com (pdf)]
Adisa and KRS Squash It, With Bambaataa Moderating
These RSS aggregators are ruining the web for me. The other day I noticed I hadn't been to Poplicks in like two months cuz I didn't have them in bloglines, and tonight I realized I was doing the same thing with Cocaine Blunts. Does this happen to anybody else? Luckily I caught this in time to see that Noz has...
New Lifeblog Software For NSeries
Nokia has introduced a new version of Lifeblog designed for the Nseries.
Eagle*Seagull
Off to SXSW. Be back in two weeks or so. Say hello if you see me at any Interactive, Film, or Music-related activities, or, you know, just hanging around Austin, TX.
Free services lose 1-2% of email
Craig Newmark says that free online mail services lose 1-2% of their email. (via rc3oi)
Next Gibson
Over on his very-intermittent blog, William Gibson is apparently floating fragments of whatever it is that he’s currently writing. Atmospheric, as always.
The New Office
So this is my first post from my new home office. I can't tell you how excited I am about this space. A little background: as some of you know, we bought a brownstone in Park Slope, Brooklyn about three and a half years ago. We renovated the top two floors for ourselves before we moved, but left most of the garden floor untouched, since we were renting it out. I had a very small and incredibly crowded (given all my gear) office on the top floor, right next to all the bedrooms.About six months ago our tenants moved out, and the kids have been basically using the entire bottom floor as one big play/art area, which was a great indoor option during the winter. But over the past three weeks, we've been doing some work on space, and I now have the back room to myself, looking out on the garden. It is complete heaven down here. You can expect a marked increase in blog quality now that I have such spacious digs.
A Phrase I Hate
I heard this over and over again at ETech, and it sticks in my craw like a sour lump of food gone bad: “User generated content”. Feh. I am not a user, I’m a person. And you know, I don’t put in all this time and work and obsession to be a cog in anyone’s business model. Just saying.
Endo
It's all about playing in bogs
Archaeologists are really big on studying bog bodies (and the ones I've seen were certainly high on the Pitt Rivers' Scale of Weird-and-Super-Cool). Almost perfectly preserved by the bog environment, these material histories are able to persist through time in ways not possible in most other environments. However, like ground reclaimed in the Fens, what appears solid is actually full of breaches.
Bruce Sterling has posted his Emerging Tech talk and I'm still fixated on his fixation on words. This whole rationale behind coining neologisms interests me, and particularly how he understands terms like 'internet of things', 'spimes', 'theory objects', 'everyware', 'thinglinks' etc. are being mobilised to replace (with varying successes) what he considers to be no-longer-adequate terms like 'ubiquitous computation'. I think he understands perfectly well how much this is all language games and image wars, and he's playing for all it's worth.
But my favourite bit is when he talks about the need for bogs:"I rather admire [Adam Greenfield's] term 'everyware.' It's certainly more elegant than 'ubicomp,' which is really a verbal disaster as an English noun, or 'ubiquitous computation,' which takes forever to say and is also hard to spell. I think that Everyware is somewhat confusing in verbal speech, though, because it's a pun. If you Google the word 'everyware' you find there's already a company named Everyware. My main critique of the term is that I'm not sure it carries enough new freight with it. It's a nicer name for an older grab-bag. Has this word been prematurely optimized? Is this word going to scale upward when we start really understanding this emergent technology?So we're left to ponder how data and meaning accrete, how naming tends to stabilise things, and how definitional struggles are exactly where we should want to be. (Deja vu? Me too! If not firmly against disambiguation, this is at least convergence without consensus.)
Adam Greenfield is trying to speak and think very clearly, and to avoid internecine definitional struggles. As a literary guy, though, I think these definitional struggles are a positive force for good. It's a sign of creative health to be bogged down in internecine definitional struggles. It means we have escaped a previous definitional box. For a technologist, the bog is a rather bad place, because it makes it harder to sell the product. In literature, the bog of definitional struggle is the most fertile area. That is what literature IS, in some sense: it's taming reality with words. Literature means that we are trying to use words to figure out what things mean, and how we should feel about that. So don't destroy the verbal wetlands just because you really like optimized superhighways..."
While he notes interesting differences between hype and argot or jargon, Sterling falls short of acknowledging the ramifications of 'object' mis-identification (however transitional) or the implied reality that un-tagged or dis-connected 'objects' are effectively invisible. In this carefully sorted future/present world, Sterling also manages to exclude himself (and his followers) from discussions around similar or related ideas that do not mobilise the same (lest we forget machine-read) terms. In this world, we can be assured that most, if not all, of the discussions that accrete around terms like 'internet of things' involve people with the same interests speaking the same languages, or those with shared cultures, objects and literacies. So what happens to difference and disagreement?
Sterling piggy-backs Kuhn's paradigm shifts when he implies that when enough of the 'right' people (alpha-geeks) agree that a term is no longer useful to their interests, they agree to come up with new 'right' terms (like the ones above). And of course Sterling is most concerned with shifting processes or transitional states: this is where things happen, where things (be)come True. Where many stories are told, but only some persist.
As the man-himself writes:
Mood: celebratory
Now Playing: Hey lazyweb! Make somebody else do it!
Better her than me, boyo
[no title]
Since the steroids controversy has flared up again thanks to Barry Bonds, I thought I'd raise again the question that I posed in a Wired essay last year: why are steroids against the rules while enhancement surgeries -- like laser eye surgery -- are completely legit? Shouldn't it be more of an offense to permanently alter your body in order to improve performance?
Finally, new surgical procedures will be so effective and feature such rapid recovery time that Tommy John surgery will look like bloodletting by comparison. In fact, there's a chance you've had one of these next-generation procedures: laser eye surgery. Great hitters anticipate the type of pitch being thrown - fastball or curveball? - by detecting the rotation of the seams of the baseball, which means that good eyesight is as valuable to them as strength or agility. One study of more than a dozen players who had opted for laser surgery found that "players coming off eye surgery are likely to see substantial improvements in batting average and power."
As You Are
I was going to post a photo of a market in Lagos but it took too long to load. Close your eyes and imagine a big, crowded space with vendors and buses and you have it. I forget the name of the market. I am getting bad about knowing the names of places I have been to here in Nigeria. Seke and his family have been taking me around and when you have guides, you just get go where they tell you to. When I travel, I tend to be like that. I like to be led. (It is only when I travel though.)
When I first got to Lagos I thought it was kind of insane. This is a big statement from a New Yorker. Honestly, the beauty was lost on me. I had just been to two really beautiful places, Cape Town, South Africa & Kigali, Rwanda. Both cities have beautiful mountains and hills. Lots of green while being real cities. (Though Cape Town is a much, much, much bigger city than Kigali.) Lagos is not beautiful in that way. It is big and dirty and kind of chaotic.
Then a few days in I had this thought that has not just applied to my perception of Lagos but to my interactions with people as well:
Why don't I just appreciate this place for what it is and not think about what it's not? Why don't I stop trying to make it into what I want it to be and like what it is?
This concept has changed a lot for me. I now have warmed up to this crazy place. There are a million and one things to do. People are very hip here. They dress so well I can barely keep up! Buildings may not look so beautiful on the outside but when you get in them, they are these incredible, beautiful places. I am not sure I could navigate this place if I did not come here to see someone who lives here. I have been spoilt by this experience and I know it.
This idea has really helped me with my interactions with people. I have stopped thinking things like Why can't you just ...? and just realized that not everyone has the reactions to things that I do or are in the same mood I am in all the time. Maybe other people have this understood about people but I am still learning.
(Note: I have been wanting to share more pictures but I have been having a hard time with both Typepad and Flickr while I've been away. I'm not sure what is up because I have a fast internet connection but Flickr takes a million years. I have begun to upload photos on Snapfish and that has been somewhat easier but photos are coming.)
Signs of life in the rings of Saturn?
"Life will be everywhere," explorer Penelope Boston told us at TED2006. "It will be everywhere we look." Boston boldly proclaimed that we'll find life throughout the universe, as soon as we start looking underground and in caves. And she may well be right...
In a thrilling report published in the journal Science today, we learn there are strong predicters of life on Enceladus, a relatively obscure moon of Saturn. It's only 300 miles wide, but new images (returned by NASA's Cassini spacecraft) have revealed spurts of icy crystals, a possible indication of underground water pockets. And where there's water, there may well be life. "We find ourselves staring at the distinct possibility that we may have on Enceladus subterranean environments capable of supporting life," writes Dr. Carolyn Porco, leader of the Cassini imaging team. "We may have just stumbled upon the Holy Grail of modern day planetary exploration. It doesn't get any more exciting than this."
More detail: Cassini imaging website | New York Times article
[no title]
VoodooPad and VoodooPad Lite have been bumped up to version 2.5.4. This release has some intel fixes, some WikiWord parsing fixes, and performance improvements.
Get it while it's fresh!
Sheepdog
faisal.com: “Sheepdog is a system for managing shell .files across multiple unix machines so you can keep a fairly consistent environment (paths, aliases, etc) across all your machines while still keeping machine-specific customizations.”
My zsh startup files for OS X
W. G. Scott: “zsh is to the other unix shells what OS X is to other operating systems. If you appreciate OS X, it is likely you will appreciate what zsh has to offer.”
ETech 2006 thoughts
I'm back from ETech. The theme this year was The Attention Economy, and I have to agree with Matt's Thoughts on etech that I didn't walk away with much new information about attention. But ETech is always about more than the theme, and a 2nd emerging theme from the conference was ubiquitous computing. In fact, Bruce Sterling's opening talk was called The Internet of Things where he discussed his concept of Spime—a virtual object that manifests itself physically for a time while retaining the trackability of a virtual object. (As I understood it.) For example, shoes could be digitally designed, fabricated, and made location-aware. That way you could simply Google them if you can't find them in the morning. (His extended thoughts on Spimes are in Shaping Things.) Many sessions touched on ubiquitous computing and controlling the physical world in a more fluid, digital way.
Another emerging topic was Yahoo!, with three or four sessions devoted entirely to Yahoo! products. Of course I'm very interested in Yahoo! after working on Yahoo! Hacks, but their presence felt heavy-handed. (Granted, many members of the ETech selection committee were acquired by Yahoo! over the past year.) But the sessions I saw were straight product-pitches with little or no bearing on the conference theme of Attention Economy. I don't mind seeing demos or product pitches if they're within the context of larger ideas. Yahoo! wasn't the only offender there. Just to compare: Google was absent from the conference, and I only saw one pitch from Microsoft.
My favorite sessions were about big ideas: Maribeth Back's reading rooms, danah boyd's G/localization, Derek's distributed communities, and Clay Shirky's patterns for social software. I think what I'm personally looking for is a more academic, less commercial conference devoted entirely to social interaction mediated by technology. That's a convoluted way of saying Social Software Conference, but I'd also like to hear about trends in ubiquitous computing and networked devices as well.
Once again, I came away from ETech with notes full of ideas to digest and play with. And even though I might not have a better handle on attention, it's often the unexpected threads that emerge from the conference that turn out to be the most valuable.
emerging technologies 2006
I'd say this about sums it up:
Happy:
- Cal's Flickr rundown.
- Ben and Matt's session on playsh.
- Jo's session on conference hacking - turns out it's just like planning a rave.
- Escaping on Wednesday with Mike, Seth and Jonas to get a tour of the Salk Institute in La Jolla.
- Loafing about on the hotel floor with geo-positive geeks.
Unhappy:
- Zimbra's advertainment.
- Everything Technorati touches.
- Too many people, too many concurrent sessions.
- Spotty wi-fi.
Plants That Glow When Thirsty
Taking the whole GloFish thing to the next level, students at Singapore Polytechnic say they have created a plant that can communicate with people, by glowing when it needs water. Believe.
Pac-Man on Your iPod
It was only a matter of time before the Linux headz got bored and made an iPod MAME. It now exisits so us mortals can now turn our iPod's into 80's arcade machines. Nice.
Judith got her camera back from the mean Canadian family
If you've been following the lost camera story, there's a happy ending for you...Judith got her camera back from the mean Canadian family.
A list of questions from a panel Jeff Veen, Jason Fried, and I did on Design for Web 2.0
Rediscovered this while looking for something else last night: a list of questions from a panel Jeff Veen, Jason Fried, and I did on Design for Web 2.0 in Octobr 2004. Have we made any progress?
Traction with 'Simpsons' clip
A video that recreates the introduction to "The Simpsons" with live actors is spreading across the Internet faster than Homer can say "Doh!" - and it is part of a "viral marketing" campaign for British Sky Broadcasting. Created by Sky and the advertising agency Devilfish, the video was originally intended as an on-air promotion for the Sky One network, which airs new episodes of "The Simpsons" in Britain. The company decided to release it on the Internet as part of a word-of-mouth brand building exercise, tapping into the popular Web video sector. (REUTERS)
Famous Hawks Try Again to Fill a Familiar Empty Nest
As New Yorkers were about to be wrapped in a balmy coat of springlike warmth, the sight of Lola and Pale Male could not have been more welcome.
March 9, 2006
TV Weekend | 'The Sopranos': Brutality and Betrayal, Back With a Vengeance
Gauging from the first episode, which marks the beginning of the end, this season may be the most creative and richly imagined one yet.