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June 17, 2006

I Heart Sarah Silverman

69m
"I don't care if you think I'm racist. I just want you to think I'm thin." -Sarah Silverman

Yes, I am slow with this one but I finally saw Jesus Is Magic and saw Sarah Silverman do standup. I had read the great profile on her in The New Yorker and knew she was dating Jimmy Kimmel who I also heart. But now I have seen her do her thing!

The end of the film is kind of random but the film is kind of random so what are you gonna do? That chick is funny. No, she can not sing but I don't care. I hear that if you have already seen her do standup, the movie is not as funny because it's her same old thing. Maybe that's true. I wouldn't know but I heart her. Yes I do. Oh and her hair is really shiny.

Originally from tuckergurl by Angela Tucker reBlogged on Jun 17, 2006, 12:53PM

VisualHub 1.0

"VisualHub bridges the gap between numerous complicated video formatting standards, and people that just want to get the job done - just what you would expect from the Mac."

Originally from tecznotes links by Michal Migurski reBlogged on Jun 17, 2006, 3:04AM

Growing Wikipedia Revises Its 'Anyone Can Edit' Policy

In response to well-publicized problems with some entries, the online encyclopedia is exercising more editorial control.

Originally from NYT > Technology by KATIE HAFNER reBlogged on Jun 17, 2006, 12:00AM

Apple, you’re killing me

I’m dying to spend money on you. Dying. But, you’re making it so incredibly difficult. Not a single day has gone by that I haven’t heard at least one new complaint about the MacBook Pro and/or MacBook, and to be perfectly frank, I think you’re in trouble and need to get your shit together before people start jumping ship. You are a hardware company, right? Start acting like it. I don’t care how fast your new machines are, if they aren’t real-world usable why would I drop 2k on one?

All I want is a fucking laptop. If you can tell me that you’ve got a functional notebook without any of the issues mentioned above, e-mail me and I’ll buy it right now. If not, and you don’t see one on the horizon, you better start thinking very seriously about letting OS X run on non-Mac hardware because I have neither the time nor the patience to take a chance on your latest efforts and risk ending up a ‘victim’ like Daniel Jalkut.

The Penguin and I have only separated, not divorced

As much as it pains me to say it, I will go back to Linux if pushed hard enough. I’m certainly not alone in feeling this way right now and can empathize all too easily with the recent comments from Mark Pilgrim (read this and this as well), Tim Bray, and Rui Carmo. Though their complaints are centered mostly around software (making many of the same arguments and observations I’ve made in the past) and not the hardware problems I began this post with, the net result is the same, namely that some of Apple’s most influential and vocal proponents are thinking very seriously about parting ways (or, in the case of Mark, have already done so). Apple, I’d like to stay, but at some point you are going to have to get over yourself, acknowledge your mistakes, and fix them.

Reality

Let’s be honest, I’m probably not going anywhere because I need Photoshop and I’ve no desire to use Windows, so I’m kind of stuck either way. That said, were a Linux binary of Photoshop to suddenly surface tomorrow,1 the decision would become much more difficult, especially in light of the fact that my personal e-mail and calendar are now completely web-based.


  1. Needless to say, a port of a good photo-management solution would be a prerequisite as well. As far as I know, nothing on Linux remotely compares to Aperture, MediaPro, or Lightroom.   

Originally from Justin Blanton reBlogged on Jun 17, 2006, 10:16AM

*BREAKING* Cristal responds to boycott...

Frederic Rouzaud indicated to The Economist magazine that he was less than pleased by Cristal's association with the so-called "bling" lifestyle of the rap world -- leading Jay-Z to announce Thursday he will no longer serve Cristal in his 40/40 chain of clubs and will "lead a boycott in the world of hip-hop".

"I view his comments as racist and will no longer support any of his products," Jay-Z said.

But in a statement the 230-year-old champagne house said the accusations levelled against it were "unfounded." (AFP)

Originally from Agenda Inc. Live Feed reBlogged on Jun 16, 2006, 4:30PM

Mikhail Baryshnikov

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<!-- enter description below -->Wohoo! Went to see Mikhail Baryshnikov with Rachel. I had seen the ad for the performance, and had wanted to go, but promptly forgot about it. Luckily, Rachel had the same idea and called me, although by then we had to scramble for tickets. Rachel came through with tickets though! Our seats were initially seperated, but a seat was open next to her so we got to be together. Yay!

I've seen Baryshnikov once before in San Diego. That time, and this time, the venue was intimate and totally worth it. I didn't dare take pictures during the dances, but still got snippets of him bowing...Granted Baryshnikov is not in his prime, he still gracefully and beautifully danced. His solo piece was with videos of his old self dancing in the background. He danced with himself, playfully acknowledging that he was getting old and couldn't keep up. Giving up on his old crazy steps, or patting his aching back as he sauntered off stage brought laughter.

I really enjoy getting out to see dance. It's such a different art form, and I've always loved modern dance (did a tiny bit myself when living in France and got to go to Prague as part of a student troop). It was nice to also have a little one-on-one time with Rachel...been a while. I picked her up downtown, and she shared some Japanese snacks she bought for us. Once we got to the venue, she brought out amaziing chocolates (see the giant chocolate I devoured?). She's so good to me - thanks Kitten!

Originally from Kokochi by Mie reBlogged on Jun 16, 2006, 2:41AM

Spiderman outs himself to the press

In the latest edition of the Marvel comic "Civil War" on sale, Spiderman does the unthinkable and removes his Spidey mask to publicly reveal his hidden identity.

"I'm proud of who I am, and I'm here right now to prove it," the legendary webslinger tells a press conference called in New York's Times Square, before pulling off his mask and standing before the massed ranks of reporters as newspaper photographer Peter Parker. (AFP)

Originally from Agenda Inc. Live Feed reBlogged on Jun 15, 2006, 9:16PM

Nike pins hopes on Ronaldo's fading star

The final advert in Nike's World Cup campaign pays tribute to the skills of Ronaldo, just as the star has been barraged by criticism that he is no longer worth his place in the Brazil team. The 60-second ad, created by Wieden & Kennedy Amsterdam, features a series of clips of the star's career highlights.

The commercial is the last of seven developed for Nike's World Cup campaign. (THE GUARDIAN, UK)

Originally from Agenda Inc. Live Feed reBlogged on Jun 16, 2006, 7:57PM

The infamous "lost episode" of Ze Frank's The Show has been reposted to the site

Fifty people showed their asses, so the infamous "lost episode" of Ze Frank's The Show has been reposted to the site. Clean towels all around.

Originally from kottke.org remaindered links by jkottke reBlogged on Jul 4, 2006, 3:35PM

tom is forbes' no. 1

Cruise_narrowweb__300x4190FORBES CELEBRITY TOP 10

1. Tom Cruise
2. Rolling Stones
3. Oprah Winfrey
4. U2
5. Tiger Woods
6. Steven Spielberg
7. Howard Stern
8. 50 Cent
9. Sopranos cast
10. Dan Brown

Actor Tom Cruise has been crowned the world's most powerful celebrity for the second time by US magazine Forbes. Cruise, the only film star to make the top 10, first topped the business publication's annual rundown in 2001. Although he came 10th last year has become the first celebrity to take the top spot twice.

"He rises back to the top, not after his sofa jumping antics on Oprah, but on the back of his $67m (£36m) earnings for War of the Worlds," Forbes said.

Director Steven Spielberg, in sixth place, is rated the year's most financially successful celebrity with estimated earnings of $332m (£179m).US "shock jock" Howard Stern comes closest to that haul with $302m (£163m), followed by Star Wars creator George Lucas with $235m (£127m).But because Forbes's power ranking also takes media presence into account, they are ranked seventh and 15th respectively in the overall list.

Let's make the correlation here - Cruise & Spielberg shot up the ladder because of the success of War of the Worlds. Cruise may be Forbes no. 1, but something tells me he isn't the public's no. 1, (or rather the intelligent public). As someone that gets brand value, I think the Cruise brand is headed for some serious brand depreciation. I vote no to Cruise in the l-e-mental list of noteworthy celebrities.

Originally from l-e-mental by clairehyland reBlogged

"Deckity Deck Deck Deck"

Our main priority at TMN has always been to provide excellent stories: funny stories, sharp stories, stories you don't read anywhere else, and all with tighter editing than Ron Perelman's divorce papers. Falling a very distant second is our hunt for advertising--we're writers and editors, not ad guys, full stop. We've tried lots of ad networks, experimented with Google's system, and sold spots ourselves, the whole time wishing we could find something that would just "fit" with TMN. Now for something new. We're very excited to announce that TMN has joined A List Apart, 37signals, Daring Fireball, Waxy.org, and Coudal Partners as part of The Deck, a targeted ad network for creative pros. The Deck's ads will start popping up around TMN on April 1st, and they'll be the only ads you see. Contact The Deck if you're interested in buying some space (limited advertising opportunites are currently available April through July). Now, back to the Rooster... Visit The Morning News.

Originally from The Morning News reBlogged on Mar 22, 2006, 1:45PM

Apple's Intel Transition: A Brief Developer's Guide

A few of my friends have been making the OS X/Intel transition, and I have been kicking around some notes while I learn what works and what doesn't. Here's a brain dump of some of the advice I've been giving people.

  • If you have more than one Mac, .Mac is the best $80 a year you can spend. The syncing alone is worth it over and over and over.
  • Jumpcut, Steve Cook's clipboard management app, is really hitting it's stride.
  • TextWrangler is still free, but I always end the day with both SubethaEdit and Textmate both open. For smaller text files, Yojimbo works the way you always wanted stickies to work. I love the .Mac syncing - my notes and PDFs are always where I want them to be. It's also very smart about encrypting passwords, serial numbers and notes you want to keep private.
  • Fence is still a work in progress, but it's a very slick Cocoa/Atom uploader that works best with Typepad and Vox.
  • This is a little exorbitant, but I also check a lot of configuration files into an svn repository, which TextDrive makes very easy.
  • If you do any perl at all, it's worth it to blow away /System/Library/Perl and just reinstall all your XML modules. I install Plagger and Catalyst and all the good ones get picked up along the way.
  • Lightroom Beta 3 is Universal (from Adobe).
  • Macsaber (of course).
  • I also have my Activity Log on all the time, so that when a PowerPC app pops up I can upgrade or replace it immediately. I notice a performance hit when Rosetta comes on.

Originally from hello, typepad by David Jacobs reBlogged on Jun 16, 2006, 4:48PM

On risotto, stock, and soupmaking

After being on the road for nearly a month, it's a treat to prepare our own food again. Last night I was struck by how very simple some of our favorite meals are. We had brown rice risotto, a dish we usually have several times a month. It's simple, it's infinitely malleable, and it's delicious. And inexpensive: 1/2 cup of brown rice, 1/2 cup of arborio rice, 1/2 cup of white wine, 1/4 cup of parmesan cheese, a shallot, and a quart of stock. With a green salad, this is a feast.

I made the vegetable stock in the afternoon, and it's simpler still. A few cloves of garlic, an onion, 2 carrots, 2 celery stalks, some salt and thyme, and parsley if you have it. It requires a few minutes of chopping, 10 minutes of sauteeing, 20 minutes of simmering, and that's it: 4 quarts of very flavorful stock in about half an hour. I freeze it in mason jars.

I must confess that I never use stock for my soups. Any soup that starts with onion, celery, and carrots or a similar combination is already creating its own stock as far as I'm concerned. And when I've experimented, I quite honestly can never taste the difference between a soup made with stock and one that uses only water. (A light, brothy soup would be the exception of course, but in my house soup is usually the meal.)

Now that Meg is food-blogging fulltime, I wish she'd do a feature on this. Does it really make a difference to use stock in soup? Are other people really that much more discerning than I am? Is it only important when using a meat-based stock in a soup that otherwise contains no meat? Does it make a difference for most kinds of soup? Or is this such an article of faith that most cookbook writers haven't thought through when and how a stock is essential to soupmaking?

Originally from Rebecca's Pocket reBlogged on Jun 16, 2006, 11:51AM

Aula: The unusual suspects

I think Nurri and I have managed to fall a little bit in love with Helsinki - which is admittedly easy to do, this being the height of glorious midsummer and us just having come off of the splendid Aula Movement conference.

Willy-nilly, I've become something of a connoisseur of the art of the conference over the last few years, but I've got to say that in Movement Marko Ahtisaari and Jyri Engeström really managed to put something special together. There were, of course, some fascinating talks:

- Not only has Ulla-Maaria Mutanen refined the (brilliant) Thinglink presentation she gave at Design Engaged in Berlin last year, the site itself has gone live and gathered to itself something that looks an awful lot like an emerging community.

In Everyware, I described Thinglinks as "a free equivalent of the familiar UPC or ISBN codes, specifically designed for the 'invisible tail' of short-run, amateur or folk productions previously denied a place in the grand electronic souk of late late capitalism." This is an idea to watch.

- I greatly enjoyed Aditya Dev Sood's tour of the place where Indian folk ingenuity intersects with religious devotion, cheap production technology, and digital media to produce (among other things) the "Indian iPod," a gaily-painted box that plays 45-count-'em-45 digital mantras at the touch of a finger.

- Having spawned the original wallpaper* - a magazine that once upon a time did more than anything to help me define my personal design aesthetic and understand its relationship to the way I wanted to live my life - I'm inclined to trust that anything Tyler Brûlé sets his hand to will be of particular interest to me.

- If an idea quite simply blew my mind the last few days - from the reality of medichines that are injected into a body in solution and self-assemble at the "worksite," to an estimate of the percentage of the world's annual energy usage devoted to computation - there's a better-than-likely chance it tumbled from the lips of Saul Griffith.

- Though I am honorbound to disagree with Joshua Cooper Ramo's sunny conclusions, his notion of "personal velocity" (i.e. the amount one travels in a year, expressed as a speed in miles per hour) and its relationship with the potential for enlightment is one I find quite haunting. This is one I'll be turning over in my mind for awhile.

One could, at least theoretically, have partaken of these pleasures at any other design conference. What clearly makes Aula Aula, though, is the stimulation on hand which has so much to do with the particular delights of Helsinki and which would be mighty hard to come by anywhere else:

- Sitting in the dimly-lit lower half of the sleek Ahjo bar for crisp G&T;'s and the wellnigh hypnotic tripjazz offered up by saxophonist Jukka Perko. ("On a personal note," as the broadcast journalists like to say, there can be no better person to sit next to at such a moment than Dan Hill.)

- I like me some modern dance, now - H ART CHAOS, Molissa Fenley, and like that - but you know I'd never claim any particular expertise in the field. (I have actually uttered that forlorn sentence that ends "...but I know what I like.") That said, Gruppen Fyra's tenderly brutal "Pendulum" was one of the best-choreographed and -danced pieces I can remember seeing, kinetic poetry of a very high order.

- Our evening at the Finnish Sauna Society was truly something to savor. If I committed the elementary gaijin parvenu blunder of asking after membership fees, it was only because the pleasure of (a) relaxing into a series of mellow, birch-scented heatboxes, (b) plunging into the shriveling Baltic, (c) iterating three or four times (d) at midsummer sunset - i.e., just north of 23.30 - and above all (e) sharing the experience with friends old and new, is nearly impossible to overstate.

- Though not on the Aula agenda proper, the bar atop the Torni hotel is my kinda spot.

My heartfelt congratulations to Marko, Jyri, Andreea, Fred, Arabella and all of the hard-working staff for putting together such a top-shelf event. In Movement, you assembled the kind of living brochure for a place and a local stance that most Chamber of Commerce types only achieve in the last moment before waking, and I just know we'll be back.

For now, I honestly have utterly no idea what time it is, at a disturbingly deep somatic level. I'm well and truly travelfucked, and this is only the very first leg of my summer business travel orgy. But as for how I feel? You wouldn't be wrong if you simply called me happy.

Originally from v-2 Organisation | Adam Greenfield reBlogged on Dec 31, 1969, 6:59PM

June 16, 2006

WidSets

The Nokia guys showed me WidSets yesterday. It's a very cool service that allows people to make simple widgets which get sent to your phone and run on your phone. They are similar to OS X widgets and do various things like read RSS feeds, show flickr images for a particular tag, or show a Technorati feed. It's still in Beta, but seems to work well. It works on Java phones so will work on non-Nokia phones as well.

Comment - TrackBack

Originally from Joi Ito's Web by jito@kula.jp (Joi) reBlogged on Jun 15, 2006, 10:15AM

5yo Kicks Butt On Dance Dance Revolution

"Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it." - Proverbs 22:6
[via robotwisdom, the vid, not the scripture, that is]

Originally from Daddy Types by greg

reBlogged by Matthew Haughey on Jun 15, 2006, 2:06PM

Originally from mathowie reBlog feed by greg reBlogged on Jun 15, 2006, 7:40PM

Where 2.0: Day Two

Roundups of the second day of the Where 2.0 conference (see previous entry): Anything Geospatial (the day's posts; Glenn is a machine) Ed Parsons: It's All About Data ... Google Earth Blog: Day Two at Where 2.0 Monkey Bites (the...

Originally from The Map Room by Jonathan Crowe reBlogged on Jun 15, 2006, 3:08PM

Coffee Monster

Fun corporate trivia! That mythical creature depicted in the Starbucks logo is NOT a mermaid. It's a melusine ! After you play with this handy coffee cost calculator by Hugh Chou, you may conclude that the creature is a siren, luring you onto the rocks of financial ruin....

Originally from Stay Free! Daily by ja3 reBlogged on Jun 15, 2006, 2:51AM

jack & jon

Jonathan_seliger_installation_view_2006_

[The Jack Shainman Gallery] is currently featuring a solo exhibition of artist Jonathan Seliger.

Seliger works with paint and canvas composed in three-dimensional structures in real, enlarged or abstracted scales that serve as representations of industrial and commercial packages and quotidian artifacts, ranging from matchbooks, baskets, flip-flops, cups, high and low end shopping bags, among other cast-offs of popular culture. Seliger’s configurations are startlingly poetic and economical and provoke the viewer to reflect on topics such as the relationship between surface and interior, content and packaging, the hand-made and the mechanical, past and present and the endless recycling of the disposable and the new—always with playfulness, wit and formal aptness.

The intended tension between Seliger’s practice, rooted in the realm of the meticulously handmade, and the highly ubiquitous nature of the packages and objects that he typically portrays, provide both a new way of looking at these everyday objects and a way of thinking about the mimetic qualities of painting. Seliger’s works merge Realism and Surrealism, Minimalism and Pop Art in unexpected ways.

Check it out yourself at 513 West 20th Street.

Originally from l-e-mental by clairehyland reBlogged

News of the Cristal backlash spreads

Rappers have long proclaimed their love for Cristal, frequently mentioning the high-end champagne in songs and popping the corks of the clear, gold-labeled bottles in music videos and at nightclubs. But the makers of Cristal don’t seem to feel the same way about hip-hop — at least that’s one rapper-turned-record executive Jay-Z sees it.

Now president and chief executive officer of Def Jam Records, the multiplatinum rapper has decided to boycott his once-beloved bubbly over comments from Frederic Rouzaud, managing director of Louis Roederer, the company that produces it. (ASSOCIATED PRESS)

Originally from Agenda Inc. Live Feed reBlogged on Jun 15, 2006, 8:32PM

And Oranges

Regarding Mark Pilgrim’s switch to Ubuntu Linux, and the general issue of making complex decisions.

Originally from Daring Fireball by John Gruber reBlogged on Jun 15, 2006, 3:48PM

Time to Switch?

Early this month, Mark Pilgrim made waves when he went shopping for a new Mac, but decided not to buy one, and, in When the bough breaks, wrote at length about switching to Ubuntu. I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently, and now John Gruber’s written And Oranges, a fine excursus on Mark’s piece. I’m pondering the switch away myself, too, and maybe sharing my thoughts will be helpful. [Update: Lots of feedback on the state of the Ubuntu art.] [Update: More from Mark. I feel sick, physically nauseated, that Apple has hidden my email—the record of my life—away in a proprietary undocumented format. I’ve had this happen once before (the culprit was Eudora); fool me twice, shame on me. Hear a funny sound? That’s a camel’s back, breaking.] ...

Originally from ongoing reBlogged on Jun 15, 2006, 8:50PM

Nerds Going Through the Motions

As you might have guessed, some of us that love blogs are nerds. But maybe you need proof.

If you're a Mac user, you've probably seen MacSaber, a little application that uses the motion sensor in recent MacBooks ot make lightsaber noises. You know, for Star Wars geeks with fancy laptops. Matt Haughey probably had the best use of the app, with his video tribute to the Star Wars kid. (More here.)

The good news is, it gets far, far geekier than that. Our own Tatsuhiko Miyagawa started with a Thinkpad Saber application, taking advantage of the the similar tilt function in the PC laptops. However, he's just posted something even better: A tilt interface to Google Maps. It takes a little bit of tweaking to get it running, but once you're set up, it's a nice feeling being able to fly through your maps just by tilting your laptop. And if you don't feel like geeking out that much, you can just watch the video to get a feel for how it works. May the Force be with you.

Originally from ProNet by Anil Dash reBlogged on Jun 15, 2006, 2:33AM

great wine

david posted a photo:

great wine

Matt haughey take note

Originally from david's Photos by david reBlogged

June 15, 2006

David Lynch: Lumiere et compagnie - Google Video



Lynch's amazing Lumiere film- Premonitions of an Evil Deed is up on Google Video, with a downloadable iPod version. Grab it before somebody yanks it off. If your curiosity is piqued, buy the wonderful shorts collection that encompasses it off his site.
Link

Originally from News of the dead by weevil@wileywiggins.com (Wiley Wiggins) reBlogged on Jun 11, 2006, 5:43PM

Deadwood's 3D browser game

Fuel have launched a 3D browser-based poker game for the fabulous perfect wonderful show Deadwood.

Tinydeadwoodscreenie

Unfortunately, it requires the Virtools plugin, a plugin that doesn't ship by default with Firefox (or IE, it seems?), and the host site and servers seem to be down. Tedious.

It's a shame that there's no default 3D plugin yet, but I'm sure it won't be long until there is...

Originally from Wonderland by Alice reBlogged on Jun 11, 2006, 2:43PM

King Kong (2005), Peter Jackson

Screenshot15_1
In which Peter Jackson throws of the oppressive yoke of association with all those assorted mythical tiny people with an enormous gorilla.

The film mainly seems to be a homage to the extreme bendiness of 1930s Vaudeville women. Leading lady Ann Darrow (Naomi Watts)'s implicit infinite capacity for not breaking is however strenuously de-sexualised in an attempt to side-step the dodgy racist nonsense that underwrote the original. Jackson takes care to show Anne’s’ non-sexualised jokiness around Kong and the bones of Kong’s ex, as well as giving her a proper boyfriend, just in case any stragglers were left wondering if she really does prefer apes.

The best things about this movie are no doubt the tyrannosaurus fight, which manages to trump the original several million times over, and the icky giant insects, particularly the grotesquely phallic leeches. In fact – these scenes are so good that they entirely justify the rest of the creaky plot (they got Kong back to America how exactly on a tug boat?). Dissapointingly, Jack Black’s character Carl Denham - the first character he’s played that openly acknowledges the lurking evil of a man prepared to contribute to Shallow Hal, ends up repeating the “Beauty killed the beast” line with sincerity, instead of the deep cynicism it deserves.

Originally from A Girl & A Gun by Josie reBlogged on Jun 11, 2006, 4:44PM

Challenge

Fao: Serena. There is no-one on earth better qualified for this task. Design me a better Doctor of Philosophy graduation gown than this, pls:


Should you choose to accept this mission, you have approx. 18 months.

Originally from the lady upgrade project by mr tibbles reBlogged on Jun 12, 2006, 5:39PM

CamWorld Turns Nine

Just a quick note to mark this site's 9th birthday. I do not know if I will ever return to blogging on a more regular basis. So many other things are happening in my life right now that blogging has...

Originally from CamWorld by Cameron Barrett reBlogged on Jun 11, 2006, 5:59PM

Rocketboom Sponsorship

At least a couple of people have been wondering about the Rocketboom ad scenario.

Here is an update for those who do not watch regularly or for those who are new:

We recently put up a sponsorship page which gives a rundown of our current rates.

Since we first auctioned a week of ad space to TRM, we sold another week almost identical in nature to Earthlink. Recently, we completed another sale at our currently published premium rate (double in size). This third account is currently in production and will be released soon.

We have 5 more contracts in development with terms and about 15 optimistic bites that I haven not had time to initiate a response on.

Because we also create the content ourselves for the advertisers, it takes some time to complete. In order to fully understand the advertisers objective and also get them to be happy about it - and the various bureaucratic levels of media buyers, legal, branding, etc. - it's taking a few weeks or even a month or more to complete, after what can be a month of negotiating to close a contract before any of the production can even begin.

This has allowed us to expand into creating a system for handling the flow of this new work. Mario had been managing the creative, we now have two editors, a full-time office manager, Amanda's brother Andrew is interning all summer and we are looking for an ad sales person to manage all of this stuff.

Had we taken venture capital, I think we could of developed this much faster, but we are doing okay skipping that part and the two of us remain in complete control of our company. Perhaps in a few more months, after a few more sales, we will start to roll and eventually have ads running on all days.

Or maybe in the future we will decide to take a hit and not run ads some days because we could afford to.

Or maybe some brilliant as sales company already established will come woo us into an enticing collaboration and we wont need to worry about the business of ad sales (when I say "we", I mean me and Amanda specifically as we would rather continue to stick to producing).

While it certainly is fun to say "Lookout Rupert!" that massive, elitist, single-handed, conglomerate media power is on the decline and the possibilities for media startups like Rocketboom are very positive.

Originally from Dembot by Drew reBlogged on Jun 12, 2006, 10:35PM

Hoping to 'Come on Down' to 'The Price Is Right'

The democracy of the audience, and the show's theme — how to gauge inflation, essentially — are at the heart of this show's lasting appeal.

Originally from NYT > Arts by JENNIFER STEINHAUER reBlogged on Jun 13, 2006, 12:00AM

Viele's Map of Manhattan

For a so-called "remaindered link," this is an impressive post: Jason Kottke began by linking to a story in today's New York Times about Egbert Viele's 1874 map of Manhattan -- still used today by civil engineers because it...

Originally from The Map Room by Jonathan Crowe reBlogged on Jun 12, 2006, 11:52PM

One Last Colbert Item

Stevenjohnson_colbertreport
I forgot to mention that Colbert did a hilarious bit during our conversation, where he professed to be a big fan of first-person-shooter games: "In fact, that's the way I see the world all the time." And then they switched to a Stephen's-eye-view shot of me, mocked up to look like something out of Quake or Doom. Needless to say, the crowd loved this, and I managed to mumble something about it being the highlight of my career.

But the funny thing was that they very nearly forgot to tell me that they were going to do it at all; right as I was coming out of makeup, the producer said, "Oh, by the way, I think they might have some kind of thing where they superimpose your head into a shooter game." It was a good thing she mentioned it, because you don't actually look at the monitors when you're doing these interviews, and without looking at the monitors there was no way to tell that they were superimposing something on the shot of me. I would have just been sitting there like an idiot, saying: "Why is everyone suddenly laughing?"

Originally from stevenberlinjohnson.com by stevenberlinjohnson reBlogged on Jun 12, 2006, 9:50AM

James Wolcott runs us through The Complete New Yorker and a history of the magazine as well

James Wolcott runs us through The Complete New Yorker and a history of the magazine as well.

Originally from kottke.org remaindered links by jkottke reBlogged on Jun 13, 2006, 12:33AM

Eventa

Wener Herzog hit with air rifle while giving an interview for the BBC.

Originally from Letters to an Unknown Audience by ezra reBlogged on Jun 12, 2006, 6:38PM

Espresso Counter-Cultures

sweatritual.gif

Ritual Coffee pulls one of the two or three best espresso shots in San Francisco, but it's not the coffee that hit me when walking in, but the laptops instead. I spent nearly four years living and working out of a carry on bag, so I'm certainly no stranger to cafe's filled with laptops, but I can't recall ever walking into a storefront so large are so completely overflowing with white people lined up and devoted to the screen. I couldn't quite tell if it was a sweatshop for freelancers or a sweatshop for laptops, but there certainly was way too much work going on to classify this place as a cafe. In fact the main thing that seems to distinguish it from an open plan office with an expensive espresso machine is that you need to fight for a deskspace... That and there are people there trained to pull that coffee deliciously.

I've been spending far too much time and money on delicious coffee lately. Ritual is part of the new school of American coffee, the post Starbucks wave of shops that aim to distinguish themselves via an obsessive devotion to the perfectly pulled espresso shot. Visually this tends to manifest itself in the rosetta, or latte art, that the barista will cap off your milky drinks with. But the root identifier is probably behind the counter or in the office, where you'll likely find a devout fan (or perhaps knowledgeable critic) of David Schomer of Seattle's Espresso Vivace. Through books, videos, and extensive semi-scientific experimentation Schomer is the lead evangelist or perhaps religious leader of the next generation coffee house.

The last few weeks have taken me from New York to Montréal to San Francisco and inevitably to these new coffee shops. Coffee shops that all seem to share the same awkward discord between the two sides of the counter. Coffee shops once came in two flavors, local and Starbucks (a category that of course includes Starbucks many corporate imitators.) Follow the online trails to your local espresso obsessive shop though and more likely find a space that feels like a teenager struggling to grow out of local and into something that maybe doesn't quite exist yet. Perhaps it's the counter Starbucks, perhaps it's the future replacement, or maybe something else entirely.

Whatever it is though, it's clear it will be well branded. The new school of espresso shops is almost always well branded, often too well branded for local comfort. Perhaps the fact that the shops are always filled with designers (you know like me) is to blame for this, but then again the whole western world seems to be filling up with designers... Ritual's knock off of the Soviet flag, with a coffee cup replacing the sickle and the hammer of labor absent entirely is slickest and most symbolically relevant of the brands I've seen. The revolution might not be televised but it will cost $3 a cup.

The rise of $3 cup (aka coffee culture) in America over the past decade or so has dovetailed nicely with the napsterization of music, ably sucking up the daytime jobs for musicians slot that the decline of the record store opened up. In an indie record store though there is a relative homogeneity you won't find in a new school espresso shop. It's a high end product and the crowds tend to vary from the sort you'd expect to find in a high end car dealership and a high end drug dealership. The only common bonds are a shared addiction to caffeine, electricity and wifi. Sitting in the packed and well branded cavern that is Ritual Coffee makes it pretty clear that this uneasy mix has a clear economic viability, but just what it will look like as it grows beyond adolesence is beyond my powers to forcast. In the meantime I guess I'll just enjoy the espresso.

Originally from Abstract Dynamics by Abe reBlogged on Jun 12, 2006, 5:12PM

Still trying to get mobile browsing right?

Widgets, browsers, portals, feed readers, widgets, and so on - folks are still trying to figure out the best way to get media to a mobile device. Via Gawker (I was checking out their mobile offerings, just following a trail) I (re-)discovered Mobileplay.*

Checking out their intro, it looks to me like a variation on what everyone is trying to do:

How to design the best mobile browsing experience?

Hmm. Something to think about. Nontheless, alternatives are good.

Link: Mobileplay.

Welcome to Mobileplay
Now Let's Have Some Fun.


Add FREE News, Apps & Games to your PDA or smartphone. Easy.


Get Travel Itineraries, Hotels, Restaurants and Weather updates on the go. Fast.


Share Apps, Games, Articles, Messages with your friends. Fun.

*Mobileplay reminds me of Omnisky, which bundled data access with a content browsing system.


Originally from Lifeblog by charlie reBlogged

World Cup Death Watch

WFMU is keeping track of how many World Cup related deaths have happened since the Cup began. Currently the death count stands at 9, six of the deaths resulting from a gang feud in Haiti over an electrical generator.

Originally from Cynical-C Blog by Chris reBlogged on Jun 12, 2006, 9:59PM

Football LAN...?

What's going on here? It looks like a LAN competition, maybe playing a football game? There's a 4-4-2 config, and a 4-3-3 on the other side (check out my World Cup enhanced leet footy skillz!)...

.. and the pitch kinda gives it away. However, as is often the problem with stumbling across cool stuff in flickr, the author hasn't linked it to any event or details. EFC, it says in the middle. Anyone?

Originally from Wonderland by Alice reBlogged on Jun 12, 2006, 9:02AM

A Global Goalllllll


American artist Jon Winet often uses new media to comment on contemporary media culture. He's previously immersed himself in the realms of soap operas and political campaigns, in collaboration with Margaret Crane, and in his newest endeavor he takes on the mega media spectacle that is the World Cup. 'Goal 2006' leverages the international attention directed at this sporting event to raise awareness of deeper issues related to globalization. The project takes many forms, including a multilingual website, an SMS/MMS project, and an exhibition to be held June 26-July 5, at Stuttgart, Germany's Rocker 33|Dialekt. The website revolves around 'a virtual football card in 64 versions, featuring updates and RSS media feeds for the participating FIFA countries, original video, audio and photography, and field reports worldwide.' The site successfully mimics the rich, celebratory design style of any other sports page, but each player's card is accompanied by reports of environmental and social challenges specific to that locale, as a result of globalization. The SMS/MMS project allows for phone-based daily downloads and rich text messages with similar information. The sign-up page for this service refers to it as 'media research,' thus implicating Winet's audience in his broader study of the products and processes of media consumption. - Marisa Olson

http://www.goal2006.net/

Originally from Rhizome.org: Rhizome News reBlogged on Jun 12, 2006, 3:00AM

For Shakira, First Came the Album, Then Came the Single

How homemade dance videos helped Shakira's languishing CD make a sales comeback.

Originally from NYT > Technology by MARIA ASPAN reBlogged on Jun 12, 2006, 12:00AM

Cut Spring Onion

Oil on linen, 9.75" x 7.25".

Originally from tecznotes links by Michal Migurski reBlogged on Jun 12, 2006, 11:16PM

The New York Times on natural beef

From the New York Times, The Range Gets Crowded for Natural Beef. Lots of conflation between "natural" and "organic" in this article, and very little mention of grass-fed beef. The article talks about the higher cost of organic feed, but doesn't go into the fact that that feed is still corn, and that cows don't eat corn except when we force them to. I guess because it's from the business section its focus is the booming organic food industry.

Originally from megnut.com blog reBlogged on Jun 12, 2006, 9:32AM

The Guardian has a best of the food blogs and Megnut makes the list

The (UK) Guardian "offers a taste of the best of the [food] blogs" and Megnut makes the list! Thanks Guardian, and welcome new readers. I'm honored to make the list.

Originally from megnut.com blog reBlogged on Jun 12, 2006, 9:07AM

Carbonation

Today i had my second-ever real egg cream and this time i really liked it! Both egg creams were from Gem Spa on 2nd Ave and St. Mark's Place in the East Village. First time, okay but weird. Eight years later = carbonated refreshing chocolatey goodness! Check out this Great Egg Cream Caper!

I've also been reacquainting myself with root beer floats. Now if i just add some salsa & chips and cheese & crackers, i'll be eating like my high-school self again.

Over dim sum, we had a funny conversation about college food. My specialty was monterey jack cheese quesadillas from my trusty toaster but i mainly filled up on capellini pasta & tomato sauce. Apparently, be loved those Lipton packets of pasta or rice + sauce. (Okay, i'll admit those were tasty, too.) What did you subsist on? Hopefully it was better than napkin sandwiches.

Originally from beXnlog by beXn reBlogged on Jun 12, 2006, 1:05AM

Movable Type 3.3 (Beta-2) released

Well, after a slightly longer testing period than we expected, we're excited to provide you with Movable Type 3.3 (Beta-2). This release features not only a number of fixes for bugs that you helped us find in Beta-1 but also three plugins we will be bundling with 3.3:

  • A new and improved StyleCatcher
  • WidgetManager
  • GoogleSearch

What's more, we've introduced, for the first time ever, a live view of our work through our external Subversion repository.

I'll be covering all four of these items and a number of improvements in this release and Beta-1 very shortly. In the meantime, check out the Beta-2 release notes to see what was changed.

As always, the following resources have been provided for your testing comfort and convenience:

Originally from Movable Type Beta Weblog by jallen reBlogged on Jun 12, 2006, 6:36PM

MySpace portal, Netscape diggs, Silicon Valley's shortcoming...

The latest Silicon Valley tech action: MySpace uses Simply Hired for its jobs board; starts to look like portal -- Simply Hired, the Silicon Valley start-up for job classifieds, has been selected by the fast-growing social network MySpace to offer job listings via MySpace Careers. This comes just two months after Fox Interactive, which like MySpace is owned by News Corp, invested in the start-up. MySpace is now looking like a full-fledged portal (click below to enlarge). All MySpace needs to add to the search bar are tabs for a few things like "news" search and "maps" and -- voila -- it will be competiting with Google, Yahoo and MSN -- and may even be more fun! AOL's Netscape.com to be revived as Digg-like site -- paidContent.org says that Jason Calacanis, who joined AOL after it acquired his blog network, WebLogs, will take over Netscape.(UPDATE: Turns out this is an old link).....

Originally from VentureBeat by Matt Marshall reBlogged on Jun 12, 2006, 1:10PM

Comments are still open on the Reader Feedback Day post

Comments are still open on the Reader Feedback Day post. So if you have something to day about the site, pop in there and let me know. Thanks! Thanks for your feedback. Comments are now closed.

Originally from megnut.com blog reBlogged on Jun 14, 2006, 11:46AM

Trans fat in fast food varies not only by restaurant but by city

From Toronto comes this news that trans fat in fast food varies not only by restaurant but by city. So a KFC in one city or country has a different amount of trans fat than in another. Which leads to this news from the Financial Times that KFC is being sued in the US for using trans fats.

Originally from megnut.com blog reBlogged on Jun 14, 2006, 10:25AM

The Best Microsoft Blog

Congrats to Robert Scoble on his new gig, and no disrespect intended to great MS bloggers like Dare Obasanjo and Niall Kennedy, but for my blogging dollar, the best blog ever published by a Microsoftie is Jensen Harris' Office UI blog. I'm not the first to note it, but I wanted to chime in with my vote there. Honorable mention goes to Ray Ozzie, who's infrequent, but then some of the very best bloggers are.

It helps that Jensen's working on Office 2007. (If they paid me, I might call it The 2007 Microsoft Office System, but they don't. Speaking of branding nazis, there's only one "e" in "Movable".) Office 2007 is the single most impressive and ballsy effort that Microsoft's put into anything since Word 6, which I think was the best desktop software application ever created.

I'll hopefully expand on these thoughts more when I've got a few minutes, but I wanted to throw that out there while I'm thinking of it. Commence flames... now!

(More evidence of Jensen's greatness: The phrase "Install the Send a Smile tool" appears in a post. Really, shouldn't we all install the "Send a Smile tool"?)

Originally from Anil Dash by anil@dashes.com (Anil Dash) reBlogged on Jun 14, 2006, 9:50PM

Richard Linklater | The A.V. Club

Rick gets interviewed by The A.V. Club, talking about A Scanner Darkly, Fast Food Nation, and the Dazed Criterion Edition.

Originally from News of the dead by weevil@wileywiggins.com (Wiley Wiggins) reBlogged on Jun 14, 2006, 2:51PM

Maemo 2.0 Beta now available!

You can now download the new firmware flashing software (Mac OS X and Linux only) and the new 2.0 beta firmware from the Maemo platform releases page. The new software includes the previously-announced Google Talk client.

For more screenshots, see:

Also of interest:

Originally from [eriksmartt.com/blog] by erik reBlogged on Jun 14, 2006, 12:12PM

"One Day in New York City" by The Writers

June 1 dawned humid and hot. The forecast: A high of 84 degrees and possible late-day thunderstorms west of town. But forecasts--for the temperature or for a busy day of work and play--aren't all they're cracked up to be. A day in the life of 10 writers.

5:45 a.m.—Inwood, Manhattan Thank you, jet lag. Last night I made it to just before 9 p.m. before the throbbing exhaustion began. But, all told, I got a good amount of sleep, due in part to my trusty foam earplugs, which I use nightly. My street is a favorite thoroughfare for the drivers of 18-wheelers; souped up, deliberately mufflerless Honda Civics that sounds like Harleys; and, well, Harleys. This is very different from the cuckoo-clock birdcalls I heard in Ireland, where I spent the past nine days on vacation.—Lauren Frey 5:50 a.m.—Windsor Terrace, Brooklyn With a rapid thud, bang! I hear my corner deli receive its stack of the Daily News. A few minutes later, heading down the block for my morning run, I see the papers, wedged in their regular spot above the deli’s dropdown security gate. I’ve watched the delivery man make the dropoff before, tossing the bundle... Click here to continue reading this article.

Visit The Morning News.

Originally from The Morning News reBlogged on Jun 14, 2006, 10:30AM

Pairing Wine and Microformats

Dan Cederholm details how he implemented of microformats in Cork'd. Continue reading »

Originally from Hivelogic Narrative Combined Feed reBlogged on Jun 11, 2006, 8:42AM

Building RMagick on Mac OS X

There are many cool things you can do with the "RMagick gem":http://rmagick.rubyforge.org/. Unfortunately, it has a handful of pre-requisites that are hard to track down. Worse, some packages have "issues" with Mac OS X, so finding just the right combination of versions can be tricky. Continue reading »

Originally from Hivelogic Narrative Combined Feed reBlogged on Jun 10, 2006, 11:20AM

Preventing SVN Exposure

If you deploy your Rails applications using "Capistrano":http://manuals.rubyonrails.com/read/book/17, there's a good chance that you've unintentionally exposed information about your "Subversion":http://subversion.tigris.org/ repository. Here's the fix. Continue reading »

Originally from Hivelogic Narrative Combined Feed reBlogged on Apr 30, 2006, 4:59PM

Building Subversion (SVN) on Mac OS X

Whether you're a software developer, writer, graphic designer, or project manager, if you create files that change over time, you'll eventually realize that you need some help keeping track of the changes and keeping your data backed-up and synchronized. This becomes even more important if you share these files with other people who are also making changes to them. Fortunately, there's software to help us do exactly this. This article walks you through installing "Subversion":http://subversion.tigris.org/ (also called "SVN") on Mac OS X. Continue reading »

Originally from Hivelogic Narrative Combined Feed reBlogged on Apr 19, 2006, 7:48AM

Who's Older?™: Actresses with arrest records

Today's edition of Who's Older?™ examines two actresses who have found themselves on the wrong side of the law, though in both cases for relatively dull civil disobedience arrests at organized protests. Yeah, sorry. I'm confident that Natasha Lyonne...

Originally from Amy's Robot by Amy reBlogged on Jun 14, 2006, 4:58PM

Title Pain

James Holderness, a guy who really knows his shit about syndication tech, has been doing some torture-testing; see Encoding RSS Titles, which shows that if you want to do something as obvious as mentioning “AT&T” in your title, you’re in deep RSS doo-doo. (Did I say torture test? James blogs at www.詹姆斯.com; the boy’s got attitude.) Anyhow, James establishes that there’s essentially no safe way to do this. Quoting him: “Clearly if you want to support Firefox or Internet Explorer you’ve got no choice but to use the single encoding option. For certain strings, though, that would mean losing support for at least twenty other aggregators.” Yow. So I emailed James, asking “Would it be oversimplistic to say: ‘Thus, use Atom 1.0?’” He wrote back “Somewhat. While Atom doesn't have the ambiguities of the RSS spec, it has all the same problems with buggy clients.” Fair enough. But I think that James proved that, with RSS, you can’t solve the problem even in principle. With Atom, you can. Which seems like a decisive argument, to me. [Update: Oh hell, James’ Chinese URI broke something in the ongoing front-page generator... until I’ve fixed it, use this.]

Originally from ongoing reBlogged on Jun 14, 2006, 8:14PM

artistic usa map

usworldstudies.jpg
an artistic reinvention of the American map according to a satirical world order. in "U.S World Studies II", Jules de Balincourt divides the US into a jumble of brightly colored squares without obvious logic (Florida’s been positioned in the mid-west, & California is in the Deep South). America is considered a self-contained rainbow-hued continent of disunity. the rest of the world is depicted as a swarthy no-man’s-land comprised of dwarfed & sketchy nations of dubious nature.
see also meet the world flags.
[saatchi-gallery.co.uk & saatchi-gallery.co.uk|via moooonriver]

Originally from information aesthetics by infosthetics reBlogged on Jun 14, 2006, 5:14PM

Malcolm Gladwell & Steven Levitt: It started at a TED salon ...

A great TED tidbit we missed the first time around: In TIME Magazine last month, Tipping Point author Malcolm Gladwell (TED04) wrote a tribute to Freakonomics author Steven Levitt (TED04, TEDGlobal), who was honored as one of the TIME 100. It starts like this:

Not long after Freakonomics came out, Steven Levitt and I had a public debate at a salon in downtown Manhattan. The subject was crime. In my book The Tipping Point, I had argued that the cluster of innovative policing strategies known as "broken windows" played a big role in the dramatic drop in New York City's crime rate. Levitt and his co-author Stephen Dubner argued, to the contrary, that "broken windows" was an illusion and that other factors, like the demographic changes brought about by the legalization of abortion, played a much bigger role. It was a straightforward back-and-forth. Levitt got up and made his case. I got up and made mine. But halfway through, I glanced over at Levitt and had a realization that I'm not sure I've ever had before with an intellectual opponent—that if I made my case persuasively and cogently enough, he would change his mind. He was, in other words, listening. More >>

The above-mentioned event was, course, a TED salon. Held at the TED loft in Tribeca, it featured the friendly, timely debate between Gladwell and Levitt, the week Freakonomics was published. Very pleased to see the salon had as much impact on them as it did on us!

Game Theory: From the Maker of Grand Theft Auto ... Table Tennis?

Table Tennis is not a prank. It's a table tennis game, and quite a good one at that.

Originally from NYT > Technology by CHARELS HEROLD reBlogged on Jun 15, 2006, 12:00AM

Will you pay to use Google Search?

Filed under: Rumors, Products and services, Industry, Internet, Rants and raves, Competitive strategy, Google (GOOG)

If any company should be more interested in the fierce net neutrality debate that continues to heat up on Capitol Hill than Google, will it please stand up? I didn't think so -- in fact, Google CEO Eric Schmidt recently published an open letter to Google users on the subject.

After reading what Internet Evangelist Vint Cerf  had to say on the subject as well, Google probably has the most to lose should the money-grubbing big telecom firms win in their wishes to control Internet access with tiered services and such. Cerf is widely considered as the "father of the Internet" and is now in the employ of Google. Read Cerf's letter to the U.S. Senate here (PDF).

Should big telecom just give customers big and tall a "data pipe" in which to do anything and everything they need? Well, this is what's been great about Internet access until now -- it's open to everyone and anyone with just a slow or fast data connection. What you do over that connection is nobody's business but your own.

Telecom firms, losing revenue to the innovation of the Internet -- disruptive technologies, if you will -- is going into purely defensive mode (much like the RIAA and MPAA against file-sharing services) in order to protect age-old but stale business models. Instead of innovating to meet consumer needs, telecom lobbyists in Washington are most likely lining pockets to ensure established and anti-competitive telecom firms don't have to change. The customer? Who cares about newer customer technologies, as long as those bills keep getting paid. Eh!

Google's mantra so far has been about innovation and giving the customer what it wants, when it wants and as fast as possible from anywhere with a minimum of fuss. Wow -- what a concept here: Give customers what they want quickly, reliably and efficiently, and they'll come back in droves over and over again.

Hence, Google's business model built on advertising -- of all things -- has worked spectacularly. Big telecom is just not interested in this type of customer innovation, and these firms are just relying on protectionism to ensure the cash cow remains. It's a brave new world, though, and eventually this dated mentality will be bypassed. Net neutrality is just the first test.

Read | Permalink | Email this | Linking Blogs | Comments

Originally from Blogging Stocks by Brian White reBlogged on Jun 14, 2006, 10:01AM

Typography and the Aging Eye

AIGA: Typography and the Aging Eye: Typeface Legibility for Older Viewers with Vision Problems

Originally from Rebecca's Pocket reBlogged on Jun 14, 2006, 8:30AM

On Returning to Paris

"Oui, Oui, Oui" All The Way Home. Jessica Helfand returns to France with her daughter to see if the Paris of her childhood, and its food, still remain.

Originally from Rebecca's Pocket reBlogged on Jun 14, 2006, 8:30AM

Walmart goes organic and the dominoes start falling

NYT: On the complexity of Walmart going Organic, Michael Pollan.

Originally from Rebecca's Pocket reBlogged on Jun 14, 2006, 8:30AM

A Summer Reading List for Foodies

A Summer Reading List for Foodies.

Originally from Rebecca's Pocket reBlogged on Jun 14, 2006, 8:30AM

TagFetch tag search

tagfetch.gif

Every self-respecting aggregator, social bookmarking site and photo/video sharing webapp out there's got tags, and now new search engine TagFetch searches across them in one convenient place.

Pop in a tag search term (like "lifehack") and get back results from Flickr, YouTube, Newsvine, del.icio.us, Feedster, Reddit, Technorati and TailRank, or what I like to call The Army of Unfortunately-Named Folksonomous Web 2.0 Applications.

Originally from RSS Feed for Lifehacker.. reBlogged on Jun 14, 2006, 9:00PM

Encrypt your Google Calendar access

securegcal.jpg

Security-minded Javascript hacker Paul Bausch posts instructions on how to encrypt your Google Calendar access using Firefox's Greasemonkey extension and a user script.

The existing script (originally written for securing Gmail), can be applied to calendar.google.com to force an encrypted https (versus a plain old http) connection to the service. To apply the script, you'll need to be using Firefox with the Greasemonkey extension installed. This sucker plus the Gmail email encryption script will have your web-based self dodging snoops left and right. Useful.

Originally from RSS Feed for Lifehacker.. reBlogged on Jun 14, 2006, 7:30PM

import/export. sorta.

XML export is here! Hurray! Unfortunately, they couldn’t quite stretch to making it work with 2.03. So yeah, if you actually want to use this feature to move to a self-hosted wordpress install, said install has to be an unsupported nightly build. Not cool.

Why they would rush this feature out without the accompanying plugin to make it usable with the latest release baffles me. How long would you have to hold back on it in order to finish the plugin? How complicated a plugin can it be? Say what you want about widgets, but they were fully-documented and ready to use from launch. Maybe they feared a mass exodus coinciding with the code push (which, as per usual, has made things decidedly flaky around here) and didn’t want to enable movement until things had settled down?

Originally from wordpressâ„¢ wank by wank reBlogged on Jun 14, 2006, 1:39PM

Will Shortz, crosswords, and the perplexing rise of Sudoku: My latest New York magazine article

Ever played Sudoku? You and about 40 gazillion other people, my friend. The number-logic game has become the breakout hit of the puzzle world in the last year, and New York magazine recently asked me to write a story that examines its Xtreme popularity. The story is based on a profile of Will Shortz -- the brilliant editor of the New York Times' crossword puzzle. There's a documentary released this week called Wordplay, and it's devoted to Shortz and his community of crossword fans; in the piece, I talk about what makes a good crossword and counterpose it with Sudoku -- the anti-crossword, a puzzle that doesn't require you be culturally aware, literate, or even numerate. The story is online free here, and a copy of it is below for permanent archive! The Puzzlemaster's Dilemma Will Shortz's crosswords are about to make him a word-nerd movie star. But Sudoku is making him rich. "This is a great puzzle," says Will Shortz. The crossword editor for the New York Times is giving me an advance peek at the Sunday puzzle he will publish a week later. "See, now this grid is jam-packed with fresh uses of language," Shortz says, sitting in his home office amid stacks of reference books like Brands and Companies 1995 and The Encyclopedia of American Cars. "MRPEANUT, great answer. GIJOE, great! Only five letters, yet it has a J in the middle -- very pretty." Shortz has only one complaint about the puzzle: It uses the abbreviation nle for "NL East," which he thinks is too obscure. It only took him a few minutes to deftly scribble in a new tangle of words. AAMES, of "Willie Aames," turns into AIMAT; AMMO becomes OLIO; and NLE becomes ULA -- a "diminutive suffix," such as at the end of "spatula."

Originally from collision detection reBlogged on Jun 13, 2006, 12:32PM

Where 2.0: Day One

Reports from across the geospatial blogosphere on day one -- yesterday -- of the Where 2.0 conference (see previous entry): All Points Blog: "These first sessions are not really about the future of mapping. ... Where is about local search...

Originally from The Map Room by Jonathan Crowe reBlogged on Jun 14, 2006, 3:52PM

More Chatter About Larry Brown Returning to the Pistons

As The Full-Court Press reports today, Scoop Jackson agreed with a reader and said in a chat that he too thought Larry Brown would be returning to the Pistons.

That'll never happen. I don't make a lot of predictions, but I'll make this one. First of all, it's just too complicated. But more importantly, Larry Brown didn't just piss off some Detroit players and fans. He pissed off the owner. This is from a WDIV TV interview, as reported by the Associated Press about a year ago.

Asked whether Brown's actions angered him, Davidson said: "I think a better word is peeved. You're certainly not happy when something like that happens."

Parting ways with Brown "was kind of easy," Davidson said. "There was too much Larry Brown and not enough Pistons. I wasn't happy with that. You've got to understand that whoever coaches the Pistons represents me. And I'm not going to give [the team and their fans] somebody that's not a good person."

Maybe Bill Davidson is over that, but to swallow that pride for the coach of the most under-achieving team in the league, whose health is still a problem? I just don't think there's any way that's going to happen.

Originally from True Hoop by Henry Abbott reBlogged on Jun 14, 2006, 1:54PM

Al Gore: we're at or near peak oil

Originally from del.icio.us/inbox/djacobs by biggav reBlogged on Jun 14, 2006, 9:39AM

touching the ground

david posted a photo:

touching the ground

Originally from david's Photos by david reBlogged

Nokia Scentsory

nokia_scentsory.jpg Industrial Design MA students from London's CSM College of Art and Design have been working to create concepts for mass market mobile devicea capable of providing 4G or 5G multimedia services. The Register reports.

"The students worked for a cash prize and, more importantly, for the chance to work side-by-side with Nokia's design team during a summer placement at the Nokia design studios.

The winning design was the Nokia Scentsory.

In closed mode you use it like a slim candy bar phone, in open mode you can use the screens and keyboard. But the real piece of resistance is the Scentsory mode that uses scent detectors that "allow you to see, hear, feel and smell your caller's environment".

More on "The Future of Mobile Design":

-- Concept Phone Bracelet - Another concept phone from the Nokia Design sponsored project - blogged yesterday. By Jack Godfrey Wood - a student at Central St Martins College of Art & Design.

-- nokia_111.jpg-- Nokia Shows Off Concept Phones - Cellular News reports on Central Saint Martins (CSM) College of Art and Design at the Future of Mobile Design exhibition - with a picture and description of the winning entry; Daniel Meyer's handset designed to sit as a picture frame.

Related to cell phones, scent detectors and transmitters

-- Tech Innovation ‘Noses’ Into Phones - Jeong Kim, the head of Bell Labs, predicts technical innovations will bring cell phones that identify their owners by smell.

--Transmitting fragrance by SMS - According to researchers, XML Smell, can define in universal and standardised way the transmission of smell which allows the transmission of fragrances by email, by SMS to a mobile phone, or via a TV show.

Originally from textually.org by emily reBlogged on Jun 14, 2006, 6:49AM

A football fresco

adidasfrescocologne_2.jpg

Unrelated to cell phones, but to football frenzy here in Europe. [via LunchoverIP ]

This is wild. Written up by LoIP. German sports apparel manufacturer Adidas "has paid for an 800-square-meter fresco painted on the ceiling of Cologne's main train station in the style - reminiscent of the Sistine Chapel fresco by Michelangelo. It's actually bigger: the Sistine measures 530 square meters). Produced by TBWA ad agency."

.. .The fresco represents ten modern pagan idols (such as Britain's Beckham, France's Zidane and Germany's Ballack - all Adidas-sponsored)," writes LoIP.

Originally from textually.org by emily reBlogged on Jun 14, 2006, 6:15AM

Welcome Finnish Foneros!

We launched FON in Finland today. As a special offer for our Finnish Foneros, if you live in Finland, you can order your FON Social Router here for an introductory price of €5 plus shipping and VAT (offer limited to first 1,000 units. A surcharge of € 45 will be applied to all routers that are not registered with FON within one month of their purchase), representing a discount of over 90%.

Click here to order your FON Social Router. And more in Martin's post.

Fon_social_routerthumb

Originally from Ahtisaari by Marko Ahtisaari reBlogged

Google Maps v. Thinkpad

Miyagawa has released a hack to allow the Thinkpad's accelerometer to control Google Maps. You can check the source out of his svn repository.

Miyagawa writes:

My recommendation is to choose Satellite mode, with the 3rd Zoom level. It makes me feel like flying in the sky, just as birds. Because of Google Maps JS library prefetching images, sometimes you have a delay (latency) moving, but other than that, it is quite fantastic.

Originally from hello, typepad by David Jacobs reBlogged on Jun 14, 2006, 10:41AM

More tantalising tidbits from Google Earth

Google Earth has released an update, in essence, jazzier and more hi-res, with a better UI. Or some such. But this bit particularly caught my eye:

"Google is trying to make all these tools more accessible to ordinary people and get them engaged in content," Greg Sterling of Sterling Market Intelligence said, adding that "the idea of a geobrowser is fascinating, as is the eventual merger of gaming and mapping."

Now, if only they'd make an actual announcement on a partnership between gaming and mapping. Really - can you imagine a MMOG that had the earth as the default map?

Googleearthgrandcanyon

The mind boggles.

Originally from Wonderland by Alice reBlogged on Jun 14, 2006, 7:51AM

Livejournal animated GIF scraper

potentially NSFW [via

Originally from Waxy.org Links reBlogged on Jun 14, 2006, 4:04AM

June 14, 2006

Ads We Love: Adidas football fresco

In celebration of the World Cup, Adidas has launched a series of unconventional, high-profile ads across Germany. We just laid eyes on this one: A 9,000-square-foot fresco, painted Sistine-chapel-wise on the ceiling of Cologne's central train station. It took Hamburg-based illustrator Felix Reidenbach 40 days to complete this pantheon of soccer gods, featuring 10 superstars of the sport (all Adidas-sponsored, of course). Click the image below for a closer look at the lads, who include the UK's David Beckham and Germany's Michael Ballack. Created for Adidas by TBWA/Germany. (Hat tip to Bruno)
Adidas Football Fresco

Gaining vacation time by altering your commute

After analyzing the data, Brandon U. Hansen concluded that moving his commute schedule by a half-hour would save about 7.5 minutes of commute time per day, a total savings of over 30 hours a year, practically an extra week of vacation. Clive Thompson wants this data provided automatically by onboard car computers. (via htstw)

Originally from Rebecca's Pocket reBlogged on Jun 13, 2006, 8:30AM

Earth Sandwich Accomplished!!!!

See the first ever earth sandwich mission!

EarthSandwich.jpg

We have Ze and his followers to thank for this radness.

Originally from Andrea Harner by Andrea reBlogged on Jun 13, 2006, 11:10AM

Faces of Vloggercon 2006


Faces of Vloggercon 2006
Originally uploaded by stevegarfield.

via Steve Garfield. Print them out and make your own Vloggercon06 trading cards.

Originally from braintag reBlogged on Jun 13, 2006, 3:25PM

Someones asked Metafilter if liquid pectin causes jam to set more slowly

Someone's asked Metafilter if liquid pectin causes jam to set more slowly. I've never heard that. I've only ever used liquid pectin in my fairly limited jamming experiences, and never had any problem with it.

Originally from megnut.com blog reBlogged on Jun 13, 2006, 11:27AM

Buying local food is trendy

Buying local food is trendy. Well it's certainly a better trend than Ugg boots or those giant 80s-style belts people seem to be wearing these days.

Originally from megnut.com blog reBlogged on Jun 13, 2006, 10:09AM

Hiding in Plain Sight, Google Expands Its Power

A sprawling new data center in Oregon is evidence of Google's extraordinary ambition in its battle with Microsoft and Yahoo.

Originally from NYT > Home Page by JOHN MARKOFF and SAUL HANSELL reBlogged on Jun 14, 2006, 12:00AM

Ninty merch at Hot Topic

Old news for yous over the pond, this Ninty merch from Hot Topic, America's mall goth shop.
The Everything I Know I Learned From Zelda tee (I like the last line):

Everythingilearnedilearnedfromzelda

.. and this fairly suave Zelda woodcut print tee. I think it's for boys only, though.

Nintywoodcut

Me, I'm hankering after this pouchy, sateen Alice bag for my laptop lugging. Can't resist the ego.

Originally from Wonderland by Alice reBlogged on Jun 13, 2006, 9:02PM

Running Skirts

running-skirts-t.jpg For the active set, we love Running Skirts ($48). They're designed with the long run in mind, featuring sweat-wicking fabric and a 2-pocket seamless design. Perfect for marathons, casual runs, and many other workouts. With...

Originally from Outblush

reBlogged by Matthew Haughey on Jun 13, 2006, 6:45PM

Originally from mathowie reBlog feed reBlogged on Jun 13, 2006, 3:30PM

AOL opening up chat even further to protect dominance

Filed under: Press releases, Products and services, Industry, Competitive strategy, Google (GOOG), Yahoo! (YHOO), eBay (EBAY), Time Warner (TWX)

The most familiar AOL brand for many, many users is its AOL Instant Messenger. AIM counts some 43 million users. Were Time Warner to falter against Yahoo!, Google, and other companies looking to squeeze into the IM market, the competitors would waste no time in snatching millions of users away. It will be a bit of a relief for AOL/Time Warner followers to hear that AOL is paying close attention to AIM and courting developers. AIM is opening chat to programmers even more, letting them in to tinker and innovate so that AOL can keep this lead against fast up and comers like eBay's Skype.

Whether or not letting more people use the protocol allows AOL to continue dominance is unknown. It's still a bit of a risky gamble if developers just use the protocol to make their own IM applications. But the more people able to use AIM the more AOL can hold the marketshare in people's minds, and that'll be cheaper to do than by mailing CDs to every house in the country for brand recognition.
Read | Permalink | Email this | Linking Blogs | Comments

Originally from Blogging Stocks by Tobias Buckell reBlogged on Jun 13, 2006, 10:03AM

The Wealth of Networks

Yochai Benkler's book, The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom is available for free online in numerous different forms. This book has plenty to love and plenty to hate, but it's deep, rich, and goes far beyond the superficial rhetoric of most contemporary debates that are a reflection of its issues. This is a book that can serve as the basis for discussions that can help remake civil society in the age of networks.

Originally from Nonprofit Online News reBlogged

PBS creates chief content officer position

PBS President and CEO Paula Kerger said she created the new position, filled by John Boland, to take a fresh multi-platform view of content.

Originally from unmediated by yatta reBlogged on Jun 13, 2006, 9:10PM

Movable Type IRC channel

For those of you geeky enough to know what IRC is, I and a few members of the Movable Type team are (and will make it a habit to be) in the #movabletype room on irc.freenode.net. Come drop in and say hi!

Originally from Movable Type Beta Weblog by jallen reBlogged on Jun 13, 2006, 8:19PM

nike & apple slashdotjammed

Showing how contagious media can stick around pretty much forever, slashdot user Whiney Mac Fanboy posted a modified version of Jonah's nike emails in the comments of a slashdot story on nike and apple's announcement last month. A lot of people must have read it, because apparently this site got a lot of traffic (for me, at least) that day. Here's the link.

Unfortunately, it's no joke. Check out the BoingBoing story below, posted earlier today, on China's iPod sweatshops.

Originally from shey.net reblog reBlogged on Jun 14, 2006, 12:59AM

Inside China's iPod sweat-shops

Originally from Boing Boing, reBlogged by ts

Cory Doctorow: A British paper sent a reporter to "iPod City," the plant in Longhua, China, where iPods are assembled by women who earn $50/month for working 15 hour days.

My guess is that this is no worse than the conditions in which Powerbooks, Thinkpads, Zens, Linksys routers, etc are manufactured, but Christ, this is depressing.

The Mail visited some of these factories and spoke with staff there. It reports that Foxconn's Longhua plant houses 200,000 workers, remarking: "This iPod City has a population bigger than Newcastle's."

The report claims Longhua's workers live in dormitories that house 100 people, and that visitors from the outside world are not permitted. Workers toil for 15-hours a day to make the iconic music player, the report claims. They earn 27 per month. The report reveals that the iPod nano is made in a five-storey factory (E3) that is secured by police officers.

Another factory in Suzhou, Shanghai, makes iPod shuffles. The workers are housed outside the plant, and earn 54 per month - but they must pay for their accommodation and food, "which takes up half their salaries", the report observes.

Tony!)

Update: A former Nokia employee adds, "Add Nokia phones to your list. The type label may say 'Made in Finland' (top-notch models) or 'Made in Hungary' (mid-range ones), but Nokia cellphone engines (ie. the actual hardware) are manufactured by Foxconn in Longhua, China... unless they've found a cheaper supplier. Yes, I actually worked at the plant for a few months between real jobs."

Originally from shey.net reblog reBlogged on Jun 14, 2006, 12:55AM

Nokia Citizen Journalism Awards

The Nokia Citizen Journalism Awards are a celebration of the very best in citizen journalism in the UK over the last 12 months.

Originally from unmediated by yatta reBlogged on Jun 13, 2006, 9:11PM

June 11, 2006

Dumbass

... Situated in a South Philadelphia immigrant neighborhood, Geno's - which together with its chief rival, Pat's King of Steaks, forms the epicenter of an area described as "ground zero for cheesesteaks" - has posted small signs telling customers, "This Is AMERICA: WHEN ORDERING `SPEAK ENGLISH.'" ...


Talk about racist (and not to mention, idiotic!) business practices! And if that wasn't enough, here are even MORE reasons to boycott this place:

... Vento [owner of Geno's], a short, fiery man with a ninth-grade education, arms covered in tattoos and a large diamond ring in his ear, also sells "freedom fries" to protest France's opposition to the Iraq war. He rails against Mumia Abu-Jamal, the black man who was convicted of killing police officer Daniel Faulkner in 1981 and has become a cause celebre among some death penalty opponents. Memorials to Faulkner are posted at his shop. ...


Instead, check out O Sandwiches, a totally tasty, friendly, Asian American-owned spot right nearby. Banh Mi are the tastiest sandwiches ever invented! (They also have a vegetarian version, too!)

Link to the article about Geno's here.

Originally from beXnlog by beXn reBlogged on Jun 8, 2006, 8:38PM

Caffeine makes people more open to persuasion

cappuccino_cup.jpgDosing someone with coffee or another strongly caffeinated drink may make them more susceptible to persuasion, according to a recent study, reported in New Scientist.

Previous studies have show that consuming caffeine can improve one's attention and enhance cognitive performance, with 200 milligrams (equivalent to two cups of coffee) being the optimal dose.

Moderate doses of caffeine can also make you more easily convinced by arguments that go against your beliefs, say Pearl Martin of the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia, and her colleagues.

In 2005, her team published a paper suggesting that the compound primes people to agree with statements that go against their typical views because it improves their ability to understand the reasoning behind the statements.

After a bit of a search, it seems the full paper is freely available online.


Link to news story from New Scientist.
Link to page with full-text paper.

Originally from Mind Hacks by vaughan reBlogged on Jun 8, 2006, 4:30PM

Taste of the New York Subway System is a directory of NYC restaurants organized by subway stop

Taste of the New York Subway System is a directory of NYC restaurants organized by subway stop. Wow.

Originally from kottke.org remaindered links by jkottke reBlogged on Jun 8, 2006, 2:25PM

Experiments with Python, PyObjC, and Cocoa

As a consultant, I am working on a piece of software for an engineering firm. The engineers would like an easy way to write plugins for the application. I thought to myself, “Myself, perhaps the plugins could be written using Python.” So, I downloaded the latest version of PyObjC and installed it. This posting is to share the three examples that I wrote in my exploration.

Disclaimer: I do not claim to be an expert on Python or PyObjC, but I thought the resulting code was interesting, so I thought I would share. I would be delighted to get suggestions on how to improve these examples.

A Python-Cocoa Application

The first challenge, then, was to write a Cocoa application using Python. I like Objective-C, why would I want to write an app in Python? If there were a cool Python library I wanted to use, I might use Python. So, I looked for such a library. In particular, I stumbled upon the iCalendar package which enables Python programs to read iCal files.

This actually related to something that I wanted to do. See, I’ve discovered the newest technology is 3″ x 5″ notecards. I carry a small stack in my pocket instead of anything electronic. The problem is that my wife and I keep (and share) our calendars in iCal. How can I get a whole bunch of events from iCal onto a 3″ x 5″ notecard? My first app Hipster Events does exactly that. Written entirely in Python, it uses the iCalendar package to parse all my iCal files and locate the events that are happening this week. They appear in a table view so that the user can decide which should be included. It looks a little like this:

Here is the Binary. The fact that a binary exists is amazing to me. You don’t have to install PyObjC or the iCalendar package to run HipsterEvents. How did I create this binary? I ran the following command:

python setup.py py2app

Truthfully, setup.py and py2app are quite a mystery to me, but they do seem to work.

Here is the Source. You will need PyObjC and the iCalendar packages mentioned above (follow the links to download). I’ve tried to comment this experiment thoroughly. It has a view class (for printing) and a controller class (for the user interface), both are written in Python. (I should mention that it does not currently deal with repeating events correctly. An exercise for the reader.)

An App That Can Be Scripted in Python

Now, let’s say that I have a regular Objective-C application, and I want to make it so that the user can extend it by writing Python scripts. So, I created a view to display graph objects (with nodes and edges). All these objects were written in Objective-C. Then, I added a text view, where the user could type in Python scripts that create graphs. It looks a little like this:

Here is the Source.. You will need to download and install PyObjC to build it.

Python Bundles

But, what my client really wants is to create plugins (AKA bundles) with nib files and python scripts that can be loaded into the application. So, I did that. It looks like this:

The stuff in the box for getting the parameters is a nib file in the plugin. There is also a python script in the bundle. The only tricky bits were letting the Python script know about the Objective-C classes. In particular, if the class is in the nib file, there is a handy method for pulling the information about the attributes of the class out of the nib file. If you want the NibClassBuilder to parse through Foo.nib to find the classes defined within, here is the line of python:

NibClassBuilder.extractClasses("Foo")

If there is an Objective-C class in the runtime, and you need a corresponding Python class, I did this:

# Create the class
GRLNode = NSClassForName('GRLNode')
	
# Use the class
x = GRLNode.alloc().initWithPoint_((r * math.sin(angle), r * math.cos(angle)))

Here is the Source. You will have to build both the bundle and the app:

python setup.py py2app
xcodebuild

Conclusion

I’ve worked with a couple of bridges to Objective-C. Before working at NeXT, I help create a bridge between Objective-C and Eiffel. When the Java bridge was created, I ported 20 example programs from Objective-C to Java. The Python bridge (PyObjC) is still a bit mysterious to me, but I can see that they have done a great job leveraging the dynamic nature of both languages to make it easy to work with. I am going to continue my experiments, and I’ll let you know how it works out.

Originally from Big Nerd Ranch Weblog by aaron reBlogged on Jun 8, 2006, 5:20PM

Traffic, how do people do it?

I have never in my entire life cared about traffic. I don't drive, I don't commute, my long commute in Seattle only took 20 minutes to walk because the line at Lighthouse Roasters was so long.

Now I find myself painfully aware of the ins and outs, and more strangely the cardiovascular health of the Bay Areas freeway systems. Major clogs and blockages have serious impacts on my plans.

So um, how do people track this stuff? Presumably there is some sort feed, or maybe SMS notification I sign up for customized to roads I care about?

I hear we map traffic here at CorporateHQ, which I guess would be fine if traffic fascinated me and I wanted to monitor it all day, but really I don't have the attention for that, and I was thinking about something a little bit more interrupt driven, and targeted.

Anyone got a suggestion?

update: People did, including

  • move
  • listen to the radio
  • "dialing 511 on your mobile phone can help. It has a Tellme (or at least, Tellme-esque) voice interface that's kinda annoying and hit/miss, but you can at least tell it a major highway by name and it will tell you about any delays right now on that highway."
  • Y! traffic rss | grep '101|280' | SMS

thanks everybody!

Originally from Laughing Meme reBlogged on Jun 8, 2006, 12:47PM

Soy Phirnee- Soy Milk and Saffron Dessert

Soy and Saffron Dessert

My first IMBB entry in a very long time. Hosted by Reid of onekinegrindz from Hawaii, it is a combined SHF20 and IMBB 27 event entitled "The Joy of Soy" or, as Alberto, author of the incomparable Il Forno, puts it in his announcement of the event 27+20=47 soy beans.

This is from a recipe developed by The Maharashtra State Institute of Hotel Management and Catering Technology and published in a booklet printed by Chetran Foods i.e. friend Ranjit Pal, the grand old man of Tofu. He has done so much to popularise the use of soya bean products in Indian cuisine, at first in his capacity as director of the Maharashtra Agro and Fruit Process Corporation and later when he started a tofu manufacturing plant and made tofu available for the first time to consumers in Pune. He sometimes holds lunch parties where each and everything on the menu is made from either soy milk, soy curd, tofu, or soy HPF (Okara). You wouldn't know it as each dish tastes entirely different.

(I have made a few changes to the original recipe in both procedures and additions ).

Ingredients:

  • 30 gms basmati rice ground into a rice powder
  • 100 gms sugar
  • 500 ml.. soy milk
  • 2 shelled green cardamoms, powdered.
  • 3 pistachios and 3 almonds
  • A pinch of saffron

Soak the saffron in a tablespoon of warm soya milk.
Add a few tablespoons of water to the rice flour and make it into a paste.
Blanch the nuts in a hot water, remove the skin, cut into slivers and toast.
Boil the soy milk and add rice paste and sugar. Stir continuously to prevent lumps.
Cook on a low flame till the mixture becomes thick and has a custard-like consistency.
Add powdered cardamom and the saffron. Stir well.
Pour mixture into four clay or glass bowls.
Garnish with the nuts and set in the fridge.
Serve cold.

Howzzat for a nice, healthy and easy dessert.


Originally from thecookscottage by deccanheffalump reBlogged on Jun 8, 2006, 7:13AM

Computer lap desk

Lapdesk

Until I can have my laptop surgically implanted into my lap, this just might be the next best thing: a cool computer lap desk.  It's got a large surface and is all ergonomic and shit.  And basically, I think that's the first time I ever used "ergonomic" in a sentence before.  It's fun!  Ergonomic, ergonomic, ergonomic, ergonomic!!!

Originally from Awesome! by citywendy reBlogged

mobile context photography

contextphoto.jpg
contextual pictures taken with mobile phone cameras, which include the alternative, otherwise 'hidden' environmental data dimensions (e.g. sound, temperature & pollution) as aesthetic visual parameters onto the images themselves.
in practice, a digital camera senses these parameters, & affects the image accordingly with artistic (~Photoshop-like) filter effects in real-time. the photographers are "not interested in having the contextual information available in raw data as a supplement to the image file, but preferred to explore the visual effects."
see also sonic city.
[viktoria.se]

Originally from information aesthetics by infosthetics reBlogged on Jun 8, 2006, 8:02PM

The tao of Trader Joe's

For nearly 40 years, Trader Joe's has staked its reputation on private labels, Hawaiian shirts and a quirky sort of charm. And so far, the formula has worked.

Company employees greet customers with laidback smiles. Handmade signs advertise bargain prices in colored chalks and markers. And store aisles stock rows and rows of products like dark chocolate-covered soy nuts, peach halves in white grape juice and seasoned rack of Australian lamb.

Californians fell in love with the gourmet grocery chain based in the Los Angeles area a long time ago. But more people keep joining the cult following as Trader Joe's continues a slow expansion into other parts of the country. (SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE)

Originally from Agenda Inc. Live Feed reBlogged on Jun 8, 2006, 4:44PM

Tasting menu on copying food

Why are the same people who criticize these modern more experimental chefs for borrowing dishes not criticizing every Thai restaurant they go to for serving so many of the same dishes? I'm serious. The problem is not copying. The problem is that we have started to judge food as we judge couture or popular music.

Originally from megnut.com blog reBlogged on Jun 8, 2006, 10:50AM

Till Gerhard: Black Nostalgia

Baker
Till Gerhard painting SOLAR SYSTEM, 2006, oil on canvas, 86 1/2 x 86 1/2 inches
photo: Stellan Holm Gallery, New York

Till Gerhard
Stellan Holm
524 West 24th Street
Through June 24

via The Village Voice:
Best in Show
Sympathy for the Devil

by R.C. Baker
June 1st, 2006 9:06 PM

In his seven-foot-square riff on the Stones' 1972 Hot Rocks album cover (in which the band members' darkened profiles nest within each other like Russian dolls), Gerhard adds a pair of glowing, drippy eyes that confront the viewer from the depths of Keith Richards's unfathomable brain. In The March (2006), a mob of black figures, their eyes mere streaks of white as if caught in motion by a blinding photo flash, wade through the Washington Monument's reflecting pool toward an indistinct, backlit blond couple. Is this canvas, covered with gouts of paint spattered across a hellish pink sky, predicting a day of reckoning after four decades of unfulfilled promise? There is a baleful cast to this German painter's work, but his complex compositions of faux lens flares obscuring outdoor festivals and abstract arcs of bright pigment slathered over idyllic country houses prove darkly alluring.

Originally from NEWSgrist - where spin is art by joy garnett reBlogged on Jun 8, 2006, 10:10AM

Google's Firefox Browser Sync

Quick Post

Don't listen to everyone else Google; you still rock

http://www.google.com/tools/firefox/browsersync/index.html

Originally from Capn Design reBlogged on Jun 9, 2006, 6:00PM

Google doing 'evil' in China?

Filed under: International markets, Bad news, Consumer experience, Newspapers, Magazines, Internet, Blogs, Competitive strategy, Google (GOOG)

For a company with the motto "Don't Do Evil," Google's launch earlier this year of a censored search engine (Google.cn) for the Chinese market has been something of a quagmire

Many activists and pundits have been in a fervor over Google's move to acquiesce to the demands of the Chinese government to censor information.

Google.com has been the global and only portal for Google's search engine, but in 2002 it faced a country-wide shut-down in China.  Worldwide protest got the site re-instated but as China's influence has grown and more notably Chinese search engine Baidu's market share has grown, the censorship dance has begun again. 

In recent months both Google.com and Google.cn have been concurrently running in China. But Google.com has faced a number of outages in China and things have recently come to a head as co-founder Sergey Brin on June 6th announced that Google had compromised its principles by accommodating the Chinese government.  While lobbying on Capitol Hill, Brin stated that Google may rethink it's entrance into China.

Coincidentally or not, circa June 6 - June 8, an Internet crack-down occurred in China which left the  Google.com portal all but shut down.

So after much controversy regarding Google's entrance into the Chinese market, Google co-founder Sergey Brin has stated that Google will remain in China, as Google believes that it is in the best interest of Chinese users. If they can't have full access, then some access is better than no access, he reasons. 

Activists argue that Google should stick to its principles in dealing with China, and demand full access for Chinese users.  If the Chinese government is going to block access then it can try; it'll come down to whether Google, the idea of "Don't do Evil," and all like-minded adherents can overcome a government.  For an idealist it's a great opportunity to take a stand and put it on the line. But for a business, the possibility of being shut out of the Chinese market(s) is quite daunting.

Interestingly enough, access to Google.com within China has returned to full operational status.
Read | Read | Permalink | Email this | Linking Blogs | Comments

Originally from Blogging Stocks by Howard Tsung reBlogged on Jun 9, 2006, 1:03PM

Media races to make the perfect Cars pun

Headline writers everywhere are rejoicing the impending release of Pixar's new movie, Cars. As with Apple's release of their Tiger operating system, Cars comes loaded with so many opportunities for puns and metaphors that the media just can't help themselves. A sampling of puntacular fun so far:

With 'Cars,' Pixar Revs Up to Outpace Walt Disney Himself (NY Times)
NASCAR, Hollywood share the fast lane (USA Today)
'Cars' Voices Toot Their Horns (Zap2it.com)
A toon-up for Petty (Orlando Sentinel)
With 'Cars', Paul Newman stays in the race (Malaysia Star)
Newman's need for speed (Toronto Sun)
Cars: Cruising along in Weirdsville, Cartoonland (NY Times)
Cars' Riding on Flat Tires (OhMyNews International)
Shifting gear (The Age)
Pixar's Cars stalls with reviewers (Guardian Unlimited)
"Cars" is one sweet ride (Hollywood Reporter)
Cars rolls along like an animated version of Doc Hollywood (Canada.com)
'Cars' an auto-matic hit (Tucson Citizen)
Great-looking 'Cars' stuck in cruise control (goTriad.com)
'Cars' revs up marketing campaign (Inside Bay Area)
Disney/Pixar revvs up its latest cash cow (Monterey Herald)
Finely drawn characters drive 'Cars' and its director (St. Paul Pioneer Press)
'Cars' wins the race hands down for summer's best film (Press & Sun Bulletin)
Kickin' the Tires (East Bay Express)
Star vehicle veers a bit (St. Petersburg Times)
Pixar's 'Cars' falls a little short of winner's circle (SouthCoastToday.com)
'Cars' just can't get it out of first (Statesman Journal)
'Cars' will take you straight to the dump (Scripps Howard)
Running on Fumes (Village Voice)

Headlines courtesy of Google News. If the movie were getting mostly bad reviews, one could imagine headlines like "Cars a lemon", "New Disney movie is the pits", and "Reviewers to Pixar: Your new film is car-rappy".

Originally from kottke.org reBlogged on Jun 8, 2006, 3:10PM

Shepard Fairey Goes Big in LA

shepla1.jpg

shepla2.jpg

A few weeks back Shepard Fairey put up on of his largest flyer posters do date. no.fi was driving by and took a few stills.

Of all of Shepard's recent work, this one is by far our favorite

Originally from Wooster Collective reBlogged on Jun 8, 2006, 4:12AM

Friday afternoon fun: Race2Replace webisodes

Discovery Channel Team Webisodes (Click “Race to Replace,” then “Webisodes”)

I realized last night that the webisodes available on the Race2Replace website are one or two full episodes ahead of those posted on the iTunes Music Store. That means that if you're subscribed to the iTMS podcast feed, you're currently 2 very interesting webisodes behind.

The first, “Johan the Great,” is a profile of Discovery's DS, Johan Bruyneel. The 2nd, “The Showdown at Brasstown,” provides some more fodder for the debate about the Danielson/Floyd Landis showdown on Brasstown Bald.

In it, Bruyneel repeatedly reins in Tom Danielson, pinning him to Landis's wheel like a misbehaving pup. He tries to get Danielson to feign weakness, then makes him save it all for a last-k attack, which, of course, didn't crack Landis.

The production quality on these is terrific, and they provide some fairly intimate background on the riders. Hincapie's wife and rehab featured prominently in a recent episode, while McCartney's desperate need for a bathroom during Stage 2 of the TdG features in the latest. One interesting exclusion is any discussion of the cause of Hincapie's crash at Paris-Roubaix; if this was your first exposure to it, you might think he just flopped off his bike on the slippery cobbles.

Also:

VeloNews.com | The man behind the wheel: A conversation with Johan Bruyneel

Originally from Tour de France 2006 by Frank Steele reBlogged on Jun 9, 2006, 3:36PM

ari kicks it - tongue in cheek

This is Ari - my web designer - I love working with her and I love this photos!

Originally from Hi Tricia! by Tricia Wang 王 圣 㨗 reBlogged on Jun 9, 2006, 11:44AM

BC Girls Summer Book Club

BC Girls is a bookclub for 7 to 8-year-olds, organized by one of the mothers to keep the girls reading over the summer. The article includes a sidebar of suggested books for various ages. "For this month, the selection is Freckle Juice, Judy Blume’s story about Andrew Marcus, a second-grade student who wishes he had freckles and plans to buy a secret freckle recipe from a classmate. This time, the BC Girls are bringing their own recipes for something they’d like to change about themselves."

Originally from Rebecca's Pocket reBlogged on Jun 9, 2006, 8:30AM

An Interaction Design Summer Reading List

An Interaction Design Summer Reading List by Dan Saffer, Senior Interaction Designer at Adaptive Path and author of the upcoming Designing For Interaction. No books here, just a list of PDFs.

Originally from Rebecca's Pocket reBlogged on Jun 9, 2006, 8:30AM

one laptop per child

Ethan Zuckerman has a great overview of the progress the "One Laptop per Child" project is making on designing an inexpensive laptop that's perfect for kids.

Most of the people who write me are interested in owning a laptop they can afford. And that, it turns out, is not the goal of the One Laptop Per Child project. Their goal is to produce a laptop designed for use by children - students in grades K-12. And that requires radically different design decisions than what one would make in simply creating a low-cost laptop.

Worth reading, especially for the description of the challenges of adding a crank for human-generated power, and how they're thinking of integrating Logowiki on to the device... (Logo == fun! I always think of Processing as logo for grownups.)

Originally from this is sippey.typepad.com by Michael Sippey reBlogged on Jun 9, 2006, 5:03PM

Hands Free

163483550_fc35681683_o.jpg

Look Ma, no hands!

[via No puedo creer que le hayan inventado...]

Originally from textually.org by emily reBlogged on Jun 9, 2006, 4:59PM

Augmenting Guy Debord’s Derive

Talking with Adam Greenfield about his next work, I though back that I already wrote bits and pieces around the topic of how IT renew the urban experience. The report I called “Augmenting Guy Debord’s Dérive: Sustaining the Urban Change with Information Technology” (.pdf) is a bit old (2003), so the examples are a bit outdated. This is just few notes extracted from a paper I wrote with my colleague Mauro Cherubini called “To Live or To Master the city: the citizen dilemma” (Imago Urbis #2).

Why do I blog this? Comments are welcome. I am not happy with the whole thing (bad english, naive ideas and almost no critical stance) but I thought that it would be good to put it online.

Originally from pasta and vinegar by Nicolas reBlogged on Jun 9, 2006, 10:46AM

eGullet trailed Grant Achatz and crew as they worked to open Alinea

eGullet trailed Grant Achatz and crew as they worked to open Alinea in the fall of 2004. It's a fascinating look behind the scenes.

Originally from megnut.com blog reBlogged on Jun 9, 2006, 2:24PM

Alinea's most exciting food

Ruth Reichl once famously called The French Laundry, "The most exciting place to eat in the United States." Until very recently, I agreed with her. Then I ate at Alinea in Chicago.

Alinea's chef Grant Achatz is a protégé of Thomas Keller, and rose to the position of sous chef at The French Laundry before his departure. Keller's influence is apparent in his food, from menu titles like "Hot potato, cold potato" to the portion size to the perfection of every detail. But at Alinea, chef Achatz takes all he's learned and somehow makes it better. As Jason said during our dinner, "He's out-Kellered Keller!"

Alinea granolaI could write paragraphs about the meal itself, the "hot potato" course served with a thick slice of truffle balanced on a warm potato ball, skewered by a thin needle overhanging a perfectly cold potato soup. Or the meaty rich squab, or the lamb buried beneath eucalyptus leaves. But you can read a better description of Alinea's food elsewhere. I'd like to focus on what else made the meal outstanding.

Keller has long focused on the concept of palate fatigue; it's why he limits his portion-size to just a few bites. Though serving small portions, every tasting menu I've experienced makes the traditional migration from light to heavier savory courses and ends with sweets. So even with small bites, I've experienced palate fatigue when presented with multiple rich savory courses in a row.

Alinea, with its twenty-four course menu, broke with the ascending flavors tradition. The menu flowed from savory to sweet and then returned again to savory. Recent research has shown that our taste buds do not experience all flavors, but rather each bud handles a specific taste, e.g. we have buds for salty, buds for sweet. The meal's superb choreography allowed the savory buds to "rest" after early action while the sweet buds handled "verjus lemon thyme beet" and "yogurt juniper mango" in the middle of our meal. Restored, the savory buds were back in action to handle "black cod, vanilla, artichoke, pillow of orange air," kobe beef and squab. This dance allowed each flavor to be enjoyed with a freshness of palate I've never experienced before.

To compliment the unique dishes, chef Achatz's has created his own utensils for many of the items on his menu. I had reservations about this, concerns that perhaps the need to be different would overwhelm the utility of the objects. After all, a fork works pretty well. A contraption that made it harder for me to eat would be more gimmick than innovation. But my concerns were unfounded.

Alinea granolaSeeing the "granola" suspended in its rosewater enveloped on a thin wire was seeing food transformed not just to art, but to sculpture. Eating off a pillow as it slowly deflated and perfumed the air with the scent of orange blossoms sounds overwrought; it was intoxicating. The interplay between device and delicacy was uplifting and fun, yet in no way detracted from the usability. In fact it made the experience quite intellectual, as you were confronted not just with the flavors of the meal, but with expectations of how it could be consumed. Why do we need forks again?

With Alinea, chef Achatz is doing what Thomas Keller no longer has the liberty to do, what all the big name chefs lose the freedom to do when they achieve a certain level of fame and notoriety. You go the Laundry or Daniel expecting a certain meal, and that leaves their chefs very little room for the innovation that Achatz can pursue with Alinea. He has one restaurant and he's in its kitchen full time. But it's always this way: the apprentice learns from the best, and then rises up to take his master's place. It's simply how the cycle progresses. One day, a new young chef will rise and displace Grant Achatz. But for now he's on top, creating the most exciting food in the United States at Alinea.

Alinea
1723 North Halsted
Chicago IL 60614
(312) 867-0110
website

Originally from megnut.com blog reBlogged on Jun 9, 2006, 12:00PM

Paper

Prothese Cut 2, collage

A Collage A Day, via drawn!

Originally from Purse Lip Square Jaw by Anne reBlogged on Jun 10, 2006, 2:06PM

Who cares about Gaza?


"Gaza" as seen via Google Trends: On an experimental basis, Google now shows the frequency of searches for terms, how they intersect with related news headlines and where the searches come from. Who searches for "Gaza"?

Especially on this day, it bears repeating that we decry terrorism, military actions and organized violence against civilians in all forms. It is sick to demonstrate again and again that states have the power to take away life from anyone at any time, in the most unexpected of places - and it is sick to respond in the same way. We are seeing civilian versions of trench warfare: deadlocked wars of bloody attrition.

Originally from Space and Culture by Rob reBlogged on Jun 10, 2006, 9:19AM

Nokia Floor Mosaic

Here's the mosaic made by Arno Coenen based on the interface of a Nokia telephone, which Régine sent over this morning. The Mosaic will be showcased at the Playmobiel exhibition, where artists explore mobile phone technology in playful way . More on Playmobiel in WMMNA, blogged earlier this week.

Image courtesy of Ubi de Feo

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Originally from textually.org by emily reBlogged on Jun 10, 2006, 7:08AM

Television: 'Deadwood' Gets a New Lease on Life

How did a show with critical support, a star creator and a strong fan base end up on the chopping block in the first place?

Originally from NYT > Arts by JESSE McKINLEY reBlogged on Jun 11, 2006, 12:00AM

The best by anyone, anywhere, they say.

This is not the Best Blog in the World. (Obviously.) But the journal in my head is something else. Each entry is wisdom's cream. Were I to actually publish this in-my-head blog the whole of humankind would swoon as mothers would throw newborn infants at me screaming, "take him, he's better off with you!"

I'll have to settle for an unevenly updated journal of links and brief entries. No manna, though I wanna. Or maybe, I can exhale a bit - I'm encumbered enough by thoughts-as-ballast.

Despite evidence: Better writers Wendy and Sarah were nice enough to publish a post or two of mine in a book modestly titled The Very Best Weblog Writing Ever By Anyone Anywhere In The Whole Wide World Vol. 1 and I'm embarrassed by the inclusion, but I'm proud of the writing that's been included.

Away from my keyboard, I "write" exemplary posts to my mind's blog. It occurs to me that a shunt for the mentally unpublished would be nicer software for me to help build.

Mai's entry is bound to be better. (And hey, honey, I might just pick up a needle and thread and, er, damage myself artistically in a joint effort. It'd be fun!)

For the curious, I think the volume includes either or both of these stories.

Originally from massless by Chris Wetherell reBlogged on Jun 10, 2006, 8:36AM

Game AI in The Economist

Recently there’s been some high-profile, mainstream business press on games: a few weeks ago, Will Wright and Spore were featured on the front page of The Wall Street Journal, and a Second Life avatar made it to the cover of the May issue of Business Week.

The trend continues in the June 10 issue of The Economist, with a one-pager on game AI, repeatedly quoting Dr. Mateas of GTxA, and including two screenshots of our project Façade! Here’s a link to the article on their subscription-only site; here’s a scan I made of the article. [Update: the article is now properly online here.]

The article, on page 7 of their Technology Quarterly, page 60 of the magazine as a whole, takes on the subject from the angle of academia getting into research in game technology. (In fact, the article suggests I’m an academic too, describing me as a researcher at USC’s Institute for Creative Technologies, which I was as of a month ago, but only part-time — my main gig for quite a while now has been as a commercial developer with InteractiveStory.net / Procedural Arts. ICT had nothing to do with the making of Façade. Anyway.)

Our download traffic hasn’t increased at all since the issue came out, just as it didn’t when we got in the business section of Newsweek; but it’s good PR that should further help us with potential investors.

Originally from Grand Text Auto by andrew reBlogged on Jun 10, 2006, 11:20PM

mission accomplished

david posted a photo:

mission accomplished

Originally from david's Photos by david reBlogged

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