randomwalks/dj

Time's Up, the organization responsible for the white ghost bike memorials that have been placed around the city to honor deceased cyclists, is hosting their annual Bicyclist Memorial Ride this Sunday, January 7. The ride will mourn the deaths of all the cyclists who were killed on city streets in 2006. The bikers will ride into the far reaches of every borough, stopping to pay their respects at every crash site. Described on their website as "a quiet statement in support of a biker's right to safe travel," the ride also "seeks to bring bikers together to honor our fellow cyclists while bringing attention to the fact that all NYC bikers travel the same unsafe streets and face the same risks every day." To join the Queens/Brooklyn/Manhattan Route, meet at Jamaica Center stop on the E or J trains on Sunday at 9:45am.
2006 Bicyclist Memorial Ride [Time's Up]

Originally from Brooklyn Record by Brooklyn Record reBlogged on Jan 5, 2007, 10:43AM

Originally posted by Brooklyn Record from Brooklyn Record, on January 5, 2007 10:38 AM

PaidContent on Mochilla's funding.

MomJunction also just closed a 1 million + funding round.

Interesting interview with Randy Komisar of Kleiner Perkins about Web 2.0 and what other sorts of innovations and companies he is looking at.

Kottke.org's Best links of 2006.

Originally from DefinitiveInk by joshua mack reBlogged on Jan 3, 2007, 10:42PM

Originally posted by joshua mack from DefinitiveInk, on January 5, 2007 10:35 AM

Originally from kathryn yu dot com reBlogged on Jan 3, 2007, 7:20PM

Originally from kathryn yu dot com, on January 5, 2007 10:35 AM

NDS, a provider of technology solutions for digital pay-TV, announced today a partnership with MobiTV (pdf) to demonstrate the first-ever secure delivery of Mobile WiMAX TV to Ultra Mobile PCs.

The integration of NDS VideoGuard with the MobiTV service enables Mobile WiMAX operators to offer premium mobile television over a two-way IEEE 802.16e network while maintaining content rights and protecting service revenues.

An agreement with KT (pdf), the leading telecommunications company in Korea, will deploy a full end-to-end system including NDS VideoGuard Mobile and NDS VideoGuard PMP on the company’s new mobile content platform.

The NDS content protection solution will enable the secure download of a wide variety of video content over WiFi hotspots, providing both content owners and consumers with a new, secure way to download video to their mobile CE devices.

MobiTV announced support for the WiMAX standard last year and is a member of the WiMAX Forum.

Originally from unmediated by yatta reBlogged on Jan 4, 2007, 1:20AM

Originally posted by yatta from unmediated, on January 5, 2007 10:34 AM

If there’s any company that can be a catalyst for changing an entire industry’s dynamics, its Apple (as demonstrated most recently by the iPod). And contrary to popular perception, handset manufacturers (Nokia, Moto, LG, etc.) might actually *benefit* from Apple’s success (as opposed to suffer because Apple becomes a competitor).

Cell phone manufacturers, in general, have been hurt by declining margins because consumers (in the US especially) don’t view phones as a valuable product in their own right. For years now, the network providers have been giving away phones for free or at deep discount as an incentive device. So, while true that the RAZR has done Moto well financially, the networks still control pricing power, not the phone manufacturers. And as a result, the public perception of value is more squarely placed on the network than the phone itself.

Apple is arguably the only company with enough brand cache and product design savvy to turn the cards on the networks and both change how people view a cellphone and alter their purchasing behavior.

Originally from Adaptive Path by Boris reBlogged on Jan 3, 2007, 11:24PM

Originally posted by Boris from Adaptive Path, on January 5, 2007 10:34 AM

From Michael:

"i was buzzed after a 4th pint of speckled hen, and after a few wrong turns trying to find the next pub, i stumbled upon this gem in a tiny alley in covent garden called neal's yard"

Originally from Wooster Collective reBlogged on Jan 3, 2007, 8:47PM

Originally from Wooster Collective, on January 5, 2007 10:34 AM

Barrooo? "After meeting with my supervisor, I have sorted out the specifics of my research project. ... I will be playing around with the concept of DJ scratching, exchanging the medium of sound with real datasets. The idea is to allow the user to "scratch" through a dataset as though it were a music track."

Originally from tecznotes links by Michal Migurski reBlogged on Jan 4, 2007, 3:41AM

Originally posted by Michal Migurski from tecznotes links, on January 5, 2007 10:32 AM

re-design cancelled until i have more order in my life.

Originally from the lady upgrade project by mr tibbles reBlogged

Originally posted by mr tibbles from the lady upgrade project, on January 5, 2007 10:32 AM

In a modern country, a rise in disease caused by tainted food seems like a giant step backward in public health. The F.D.A. is trying to find a way to stop outbreaks like the recent spinach and lettuce contaminations, but doesn't have the resources for inspections of every farm.

Originally from Megnut by meg@megnut.com (Meg Hourihan) reBlogged on Jan 4, 2007, 9:21AM

Originally posted by meg@megnut.com (Meg Hourihan) from Megnut, on January 5, 2007 10:32 AM

Every four to six months, Stewart Butterfield updates his website, whether the Internet is ready or not. This time, Sylloge ruminates on John Adams' thoughts on education through the generations. The quote was a nice present to find on Christmas morning.

Originally from Anil Dash by Anil reBlogged

Originally posted by Anil from Anil Dash, on January 5, 2007 10:31 AM

See, you make some money and no one feels like they ever have to give you anything again.

Ron Artest is writing a journal for HipHopGame.com. Here's an excerpt:

I had a Christmas party with my wife. I bought her a NASCAR race car. I didn’t get nothing for Christmas, but I never really want anything. My kids had fun on Christmas. My family came over and we cooked some dinner. Foul Monday came over too. It was all good.

I’m making my New Year’s Resolutions. I’m going to be a better family man, take my kids to church more and overall just try to be a better person.

For everybody reading this, I want you to know that I’m a positive person. The only time I can get a little bit unpositive is when the haters out there want Ron Artest to be how they want him to be. That’s never going to happen. I’m going to be how I want to be. To all the people who respect other people’s personalities, one love. To everyone else, I want them to smack the shit out themselves with their own hand.

Foul Monday, by the way, is a rapper on Artest's label, not a nickname for Ron's sour alter ego.

via Sam Rubenstein

Originally from True Hoop by Henry Abbott reBlogged on Jan 4, 2007, 2:26PM

Originally posted by Henry Abbott from True Hoop, on January 5, 2007 10:29 AM

"Manhattan," by Howard Horowitz, first appeared in the New York Times on August 30, 1997: it was a poem in the shape of Manhattan Island, about Manhattan, with references to various neighbourhoods and landmarks in the appropriate locations. It's...

Originally from The Map Room by Jonathan Crowe reBlogged on Jan 4, 2007, 2:08PM

Originally posted by Jonathan Crowe from The Map Room, on January 5, 2007 10:29 AM

Malcolm Gladwell on the difference between secrets and puzzles, particularly as it relates to something like the Enron scandal. I think this is one of the more interesting pieces from Gladwell in recent years. Having lived in California during the blackouts and the absurdly high electricity bills, I want Skilling's head as much as anyone, but Gladwell has a good point here. There's more on his blog, including a question: "According to the way the accounting rules were written at the time, what specific transgressions were Skilling guilty of that merited twenty-four years in prison?" Also note the similar themes to one of my favorite articles from last year, The Press' New Paradigm.

Originally from kottke.org remaindered links by jkottke reBlogged on Jan 4, 2007, 6:11PM

Originally posted by jkottke from kottke.org remaindered links, on January 5, 2007 10:27 AM

[The Wall Street Journal] got a re-design....the inspiration? Learnings from how you and I use the Internet.

To keep their audiences happy newspapers need to better understand how readers read and use information online. After all, the more time we spend online, the more our expectations change in terms of how we receive and interpret information. Short, impactful tidbits of info. is want we want and increasingly what we are demanding from all media providers.

Said BusinessWeek’s Catherine Holohan, "The once-ignored stepchild is getting a lot more attention lately, both from Internet-savvy audiences and deep-pocketed advertisers. Perhaps the biggest evidence of this change is the redesigned Wall Street Journal and WSJ.com (DJ), launched on Jan. 2. The narrower, more colorful print edition now concentrates on analysis stories, leaving the breaking news that once made up nearly half the newspaper for the online edition, which publishes throughout the day. ‘Business news, in particular, is very sensitive to the time cycle,’ says Bill Grueskin, managing editor of The Wall Street Journal Online, explaining the impetus for the redesign. ‘The value of a story that you break’ diminishes as more publications publish their own online versions within minutes, he says.

Industry executives and analysts say the paper is going in the right direction and that other publications will have to follow suit or risk folding.

Originally from l-e-mental by clairehyland reBlogged

Originally posted by clairehyland from l-e-mental, on January 5, 2007 10:27 AM

TED2006 speaker Jamais Cascio has a very interesting way of considering cheeseburgers. He tries (in this post) to calculate their carbon footprint: how much carbon is produced in the process of cooking the burger, plus growing the feed for the cattle, growing and milling the wheat to make bread, growing the other ingredients, slaughtering and freezing the cattle for meat, pickling cucumbers, storing and transporting, driving to the fast-food restaurant, etc, not to forget, at the beginning of the chain, the methane emissions from the cattle. He details the sources of his data and his calculations in the post, and concludes that

the overall CO2-equivalent emissions from all the cheeseburgers consumed in the US [in a year] roughly equal the greenhouse output of 100'000 SUVs.

Originally posted by Bruno Giussani from TED Blog, on January 5, 2007 10:26 AM

Ms. Pinky, Max/MSP, Processing. Simple radar-style visualization of real-time scratch data.

Originally from tecznotes links by Michal Migurski reBlogged on Jan 5, 2007, 2:51AM

Originally posted by Michal Migurski from tecznotes links, on January 5, 2007 10:23 AM

Perhaps the most satisfying thing I read today is that in 6 months Google Calendar has gone from launch to being almost in a horse race with Yahoo Calendar for top spot.

Why should I care? Because Google Calendar’s success is an example of the power of experience strategy. How do I mean that?

Among the presenters at last September’s Future of Web Apps conference was Carl Sjogreen, the product manager for Google Calendar. Carl described the user research that his team did before any design or coding took place (not common practice at Google), and how they informed the vision of what Google Calendar should be. From his deck (PDF):

Here’s a product whose very definition was predicated on empathy for true customer needs. And it’s succeeding brilliantly. (We refer to such a vision as an “experience strategy,” which I’ll talk more about in my next post.)

Don’t forget: Yahoo and MSN’s calendars have been around for *years*. Google Calendar has been around for 8 months. And it’s very much on target to surpass Yahoo!’s standing as number one calendar.

Originally from Adaptive Path by peterme reBlogged on Jan 5, 2007, 12:00AM

Originally posted by peterme from Adaptive Path, on January 5, 2007 10:23 AM

I'm reading Malcolm Gladwell's latest for The New Yorker, and thinking about why visualization, network analysis, data mining, and graph theory are rapidly becoming interesting to a growing number of people right now.

From the article:

Of all the moments in the Enron unravelling, this meeting is surely the strangest. The prosecutor in the Enron case told the jury to send Jeffrey Skilling to prison because Enron had hidden the truth. ... But what truth was Enron hiding here? Everything Weil learned for his Enron expose came from Enron, and when he wanted to confirm his numbers the company's executives got on a plane and sat down with him in a conference room in Dallas. Nixon never went to see Woodward and Bernstein at the Washington Post. He hid in the White House.

In a nutshell, I think this passage captures what's different about corruption now vs. corruption then, which the article refers to as the difference between a puzzle (missing information must be found, e.g. Watergate's Deep Throat) and a mystery, characterized by excessive information and lots of noise. I'm seeing a lot of pushing in this direction from a bunch of smart people: Jeff Heer created Exploring Enron, a visual analysis application for corporate e-mail, while Adrian Holovaty thinks that newspapers need to fundamentally change and better adapt to DBA-thinking.

I think Jeff's more on-target than Adrian, mostly because Jeff is working on the analysis side of things, rather than the data creation side. I don't think the value of a newspaper is in its ability to populate a SQL table of obits or mayoral appearances, especially if the meat of the news is in the margins. Read the article for some finance-geeky details of Enron's accounting showing how hard it is to see a clear picture through the fog of hype, even when all the relevant facts are right there in front of you. The comments on Adrian's post ("microformats!" "semantic web!") reduce reporters to glorified UPS guys, waving their little hand-held journo-data-collectors around instead of asking insightful questions.

Originally from tecznotes reBlogged

Originally from tecznotes , on January 5, 2007 10:23 AM

Holy crap, Gina got her own hedcut portrait in the Wall Street Journal this morning! She'll be under her desk for days over this.

Originally from kottke.org remaindered links by jkottke reBlogged on Jan 5, 2007, 9:46AM

Originally posted by jkottke from kottke.org remaindered links, on January 5, 2007 10:20 AM

Sure, everybody's linking to Ironic Sans' (admittedly entertaining) Celebrity Patents, since Waxy pointed them out, but did you know Prince actually has a real patent?

Patent D349127 is for a portable electronic keyboard musical instrument. But Prince prefers to call the monstrosity the Purpleaxxe™.

It's a horrible 80s-style keytar, though it wasn't created or actively used until well into the 90s. Prince, of course, didn't inflict the ungainly shoulder-mounted funk launcher on his own frame -- he made his then-keyboardist Tommy Elm play it. But no, this sort of humiliation wasn't enough for Prince to inflict on the young man, he also renamed the poor fellow Tommy Barbarella, after -- you guessed it! -- the 1968 Jane Fonda sci-fi cheesecake flick. As you might guess, it's one of Prince's favorite movies.

Though the Purpleaxxe™ has fallen into disuse in the interceding decade and a half, Elm is still saddled with his unfortunate sobriquet (joining such stalwart Prince-named talents as Carmen Electra). And you can find mention of the Purpleaxxe™ in various liner notes on Prince's albums, as well as the lyrics to a b-side remix on an out-of-print CD single from 1992. You know, if you're in to that sort of thing.

Originally from Anil Dash by Anil reBlogged

Originally posted by Anil from Anil Dash, on January 5, 2007 10:20 AM

Posted by Adrian Graham, Product Manager, Picasa


What’s a holiday without the memorable (and embarrassing) photos? The holidays are almost here, which (at least if you’re in my family) means babies chewing on presents, the dog dressed in a ridiculous reindeer costume, and someone (cough, Uncle Charlie) passed out after too much eggnog. Although I think about this now and wince in advance, I know that I’m going to want to capture these moments and more importantly, share them with the rest of my family and friends. That’s why I’m excited about the new features we’ve added to Picasa Web Albums, just in time for the holidays.

Print ordering is my favorite—it’s something you have told us you've wanted since we first launched. Now, when you or anyone else views photos in Picasa Web Albums, there’s an option to order prints directly from the site. We currently offer prints and products from Shutterfly and PhotoWorks, but we’ll be adding more soon.

Other new features include video upload for easy sharing (it’s just like with photos—select them in Picasa and click the “Web Album” button) and searching tools. Now you can search over your own captions, album titles, and album descriptions, and you can even search for photos in your friends’ public albums. Digging up that picture of me trying to figure out which end of the holiday turkey is "up" should be easier than ever.

So check out these new features before all the festivities start. And however you celebrate the holidays this year, I hope you’ll take lots of pictures.

Originally from Official Google Blog by A Googler reBlogged

Originally posted by A Googler from Official Google Blog, on January 3, 2007 6:23 PM

Posted by Doug Banks, Software Engineer

We've all heard about the Wright brothers, Thomas Edison, and Alexander Graham Bell -- famous inventors whose creative minds changed the course of history. But there are many more like them, and millions of inventions that have been patented in the U.S. alone -- from useful everyday items such as adhesive tape and contact lenses to, er, things useful in specific situations, like this shark protector suit or this amusement device incorporating simulated cheese and mice.

Today, we're excited to be releasing the beta version of Google Patent Search, which makes it easy to search the full text of the U.S. patent corpus and find patents that interest you. Start your exploration at www.google.com/patents or visit the Advanced Patent Search page to search by criteria, including patent number, inventor, and filing date. You can view images of original patents online.

Google Patent Search uses much of the same technology that powers Google Book Search, so you can scroll through pages and zoom in on text and illustrations just like you can with books.

It's a natural extension of our mission to make this public domain government information more easily accessible using Google’s search technology. We’re pleased to have started with over 7 million patents granted by the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) and look forward to expanding our coverage over time.

Update: Removed mention of saving and printing as we're still working on that.

Originally from Official Google Blog by A Googler reBlogged

Originally posted by A Googler from Official Google Blog, on January 3, 2007 6:23 PM

After sleeping a few minutes shy of 20 hours to recover from Harry Knowles 24 hour long film festival, (yes, I sat through all 24 hours of it, with the aid of some energy drink that tasted like lighter fluid and regurgitated red-hots) I am shakily trying to parse my memories and record some impressions. It would be unfair to really review many of the movies here since they were given only one viewing in an altered state, and a couple of the films were actually unfinished, but I'll take a small jab at my favorites and least favorites. It was a strange assemblage of movies, most new, a couple old-

• Black Snake Moan
  Samuel L Jackson tries to rehabilitate a half naked Christina Ricci from her nymphomania by chaining her to his radiator and playing the blues. Some interesting moments, but I found it to be weaker and sillier than the directors first film, Hustle and Flow.


• Dreamgirls
  Musical story of a Surpremes-style band's rise to fame in an alternate 70's. I couldn't get into it but I'm sure it will have a huge audience in middle-aged black women and drag queens. I wish they had pushed it even further into camp- "Trapped in a Closet" style.
  
• Once upon a girl
  Unwatchably shitty pornographic cartoon from the 70's made by Hanna Barbera animators who were slumming for coke money or something. Lots of bizarre infantileism and fantasy breast-feeding rendered all the more disturbing by the sweat-shop animation. Think Wacky Races if they just looped the same footage of the characters getting hard-ons through their pants. In my fascist dictatorship everyone involved in making this film would be up against the wall blindfolded waiting for bullets in the name of cultural purification.


• Inherit the Wind
  Flm adaptation of the play, starring Spencer Tracy and Gene Kelley. Plenty has been written already about this film over the years, and I didn't gain any new readings of it in the context of this festival, but I did enjoy seeing it on the screen. 46 years later we're still on the edge of devolving into a horde of pitchforked villagers worshipping Santa Claus and the sound of their own voices, so this movie is just as relevant now as ever.


• Rocky Balboa
  Inoffensive as velveeta singles slices. The film was much more competently made than I ever would have imagined, but Rocky movies just aren't my thing. The audience loved it.


• Knocked up
  Nicely penned and acted Judd Apatow comedy about an unplanned pregnancy.


• Black Book (Zwartboek)
  Probably my favorite of the new films in the festival. Black Book is the story of a Netherlands resistance agent who seduces a Gestapo officer but winds up falling in love with him herself.
  Lars Nilsen, Curator of the Alamo Drafthouse's Weird Wednesday Midnight movies summed the film up better than I could in my current groggy state:
  

  Next up was Paul Verhoeven's new film THE BLACK BOOK. I kind of thought Verhoeven was a little washed up. Wrong. Holy shit, this is an intense movie. Though at this point in the night everyone was weary and less receptive than maybe they should have been. And I had to strain to pay attention myself but when I woke up this afternoon this was the movie I was still thinking about. The other movies were pretty much digested in the theater but this one was still haunting me. Verhoeven is one of the all-time masters and he's at peak form here. It's a story of a young Jewish cabaret singer (Carice Van Houten) who flees the Nazis during the last few months of WW2 and ends up in a Dutch resistance cell. She goes undercover among the SS and her cover is always in danger of being blown amid a shifting pattern of double-crosses and betrayals. The theme of the movie is "everyone who survives a war is guilty in some way". When Verhoeven goes to work on an audience in the action and suspense scenes it's like being punched in the face and feeling the adrenaline well up inside. I felt alternating respect (a whole lot of it), and pity for Carice Van Houten, who is in practically every scene. She gives the best performance I've seen in a long time, and it's a ridiculously demanding part that calls for her to do everything from singing a naughty German dancehall song with the SS Monster who slaughtered her entire family to dying her pubic hair blonde for the resistance to being covered in buckets of shit by the liberated Dutch who believe she is a collaborator. It's a performance of heroic depth and breadth. And in addition to being a brilliant actress she's a gorgeous, luminous, magical Star. So yes I was impressed. If she doesn't win every award out there I demand a recount.

  
  (Link: Weird Wednesday's Lars on BNUT 8)
  
• The Informer
  John Ford's story of an IRA member who judases his friend for the reward money went over like a lead balloon with the audience, but I enjoyed my first viewing of a classic flick.


• Raw Force
  I already saw this one at Terror Thursday, but I was happy to see it again. Schlocky and hilarious 70's American kung fu movie about a cruise ship that happens to be carrying the Burbank Karate club sinking off the coast of an island full of zombie black-belt magazine readers.. I mean 'ancient warriors'... and some cannibal monks. If you've seen the trailer you've seen all the good parts, but it's still funny. I would have rather watched last Thursday's jaw droppingly bizarre Devil Fetus again rather than this one though.


• Smokin' Aces
  This was another crowd favorite that I totally detested and therefore will refrain from writing about here. Guy Ritchie style hyperkinetic action movie that was about a millimeter deep. My neighbor leaned over to me at one point and asked, "does this game have multiplayer mode?"


• 300
  This adaptation of Frank Miller's historically dubious, nationalistic, bloodbath-comic consists of pretty much one big slow motion battle scene. I think the title is the number of slowed-down spear impalings in the movie. You may not have known this, but the Persian king Xerxes I was evidently an 8 foot tall effeminate bald man of indeterminate, dusky ethnicity who was really into facial piercings. Also, the Persian army filled its ranks with giant troll-monsters and partied with anthropomorphic goats. To be fair, the director (who was on hand for an early morning Q&A) explained the deviation from historical fact by saying the film was like a 'Spartan fever dream'- that it was a mythologized version of the battle that might be retold to children to rouse them to fight themselves, and in fact the movie closes with the narration wrapping up as the end of a pre-battle speech. But this is really side stepping the truth, that the story is really Frank Miller's fever dream. One that exalts a completely militarized culture that practices eugenics, condescends neighboring Athenians as 'philosophers and boy lovers' and demonizes an enemy so alien and 'other' that some of them seem to actually be devolving into half-human half-animal bogeymen (and ninjas!). While I thought Gerard Butler has a very screen worthy presence in the film, no one is given much to say other than he-man posturing and cliche platitudes. The Spartan queen actually challenges us with the line "Freedom isn't Free" at one point, and you would have to be pretty dim not to see what Miller is getting at, especially with Persians as the enemy. I'll be interested to see how much director Snyder has internalized the politics of this movie when he starts filming Watchmen, the landmark Alan Moore comic from the 80's that couldn't be more polar opposite in either its politics or in the sublety of its execution. It's hard to predict, because what I remember of the comic version of 300 didn't go so far as to present the Persians as actual monsters, but I may have to re-read it.
  The audience whooped and cried for joy at this movie. Maybe it will convince them to join the army. The only thing I liked about the film was its color palette. Oh, and the fact that the Toxic Avenger has a role as the genetically inferior Spartan who escaped from being thrown off a cliff at birth to betray the king. They should have given him his mop though, instead of a spear.

(Link: Wikipedia, Battle of Thermopylae)

Interspersed between the films were a curation of amazing vintage movie trailers that were actually the real highlight for me. I hope that someone at the Alamo gets hold of Cursed for Terror Thursday. The trailer looks amazing.

Originally from News of the dead by weevil@wileywiggins.com (Wiley Wiggins) reBlogged on Dec 31, 1969, 6:59PM

Originally posted by weevil@wileywiggins.com (Wiley Wiggins) from News of the dead, on January 3, 2007 6:23 PM

I can't seem to get an accurate reading on Lynch's Inland Empire based off the reviews I've been reading- which is good, because it means I'm just going to have to see it in the theater myself, 3 hours of DV or no.
Here's Manola Dargis' take on the film.

Originally from News of the dead by weevil@wileywiggins.com (Wiley Wiggins) reBlogged on Dec 31, 1969, 6:59PM

Originally posted by weevil@wileywiggins.com (Wiley Wiggins) from News of the dead, on January 3, 2007 6:23 PM

Fascinating story about the home and hoard of a hermit who collected massive piles of junk, kept meticulous diaries of his life and everything he did, and apparently liked to jerk-off to a loop of me getting spanked in Dazed. Life is weird.

If the house on Washington Square could talk: "Steve Sisk, a junk collector, spent 14 hours digging in one of the Dumpsters at 3001 Washington Square. He never met Mathews either, but he thinks he understands the way his mind worked.
[...]It was Sisk who looked over Mathews' extensive collection of X-rated videos, and who bothered to watch one of the homemade videos, which Sisk described as a continuous loop of a spanking scene from the movie 'Dazed and Confused.' It was Sisk who figured out Mathews' private video rating system, curious symbols that appear over and over again in his diaries. The symbols, he said, signify paddles.

Originally from News of the dead by weevil@wileywiggins.com (Wiley Wiggins) reBlogged on Dec 31, 1969, 6:59PM

Originally posted by weevil@wileywiggins.com (Wiley Wiggins) from News of the dead, on January 3, 2007 6:23 PM

Holy cow! This is some interesting stuff.

• Pat Riley leads off saying that James Posey and Antoine Walker will be deactivated today for not meeting team conditioning goals. If they don't meet the benchmarks by January 15, they will be suspended. He says the goals have been made clear, and they are both in good shape, but they haven't met the goals. He later says he expects it won't take long for them to get back to the team.
• Asked clearly whether or not he will return to coach again, he says that's "his plan." Which is not the same as "yes."
• A reporter asked if it was true that he aggravated his knee by kicking a door during a locker room tirade. Riley did not deny it, saying what happens in the locker room is private.
• He's not all that upbeat about the team. He says it's a championship team that is currently "sideways."
• "I made a decision to take care of myself... so that I'll be strong enough to come back and kick their asses..."
• Why didn't he get surgery before? He didn't feel like it. Next question.
• He says that it's his opinion that Miami assistant Erik Spoelstra is the next great young NBA coach.

Originally from True Hoop by Henry Abbott reBlogged on Jan 3, 2007, 5:18PM

Originally posted by Henry Abbott from True Hoop, on January 3, 2007 6:14 PM

That sounds kind of dirty, doesn't it?

It used to be that in the Washington Post sports section, there was a little section on page two where Tony Kornheiser would mouth off about whatever. But now that he's in the eye of the sports media storm, that real estate is typically dedicated to none other than Dan Steinberg of the D.C. Sports Bog, which may be the best sports blog in the world. (By the way, Washington D.C. is way ahead of the sports blog curve. Umm... Wizznutzz?)

Steinberg--still not convinced of the power of blogs even as he runs a stellar one--can see the writing on the wall. Transcription (and commentary in brackets) by Steinberg, based on Kornheiser's appearance on Sportstalk 980:

Tony and his friend Andy Pollin are talking about Tony's future. The transcript:

Tony: What will I do? I'd like to, I'd like to do something like I did before, that is very current, very sort of small and, you know, sort of idiosyncratic. But I notice, I notice in the paper now that in the space I used to have, they've given it to the Cheese Boy (laughter). So I don't, you know, I guess there's no room for me in the paper.

Andy: The blogger? [Naked contempt oozing out of the speakers on my computer.]

Tony: Yeah, the Cheese Boy.

Andy: Is that what you call Dan Steinberg?

Tony: Well he went to, he went to, where were the last Olympics? Afghanistan, Norway?

Andy: Yeah, something like that.

Tony: Wherever, Brazil. And he wrote about cheese every day. [Ed. note: I think I actually missed a few days, when I was concentrating on curling.]

Andy: That's right, yeah.

Tony: So I call him the Cheese Boy. And I, you know, I don't know, if that's.... Look, if that's his territory now, you know, God bless him, that's fine with me. [As movers show up at my desk and start packing up my things.] I'm sure that I could find some spot on D7, you know, right behind the tire ads. [As HR starts talking to me about possible compensation packages.] People would find me if they cared. [Plus, my cell phone number is actually owned by The Post. That's gonna be inconvenient.]

Andy: Well I know The Examiner is looking for people, so in case you want to send out a resume.... [Evil cackling. I think. Maybe I imagined that part. Anyhow, I'm toast.]

Originally from True Hoop by Henry Abbott reBlogged on Jan 3, 2007, 4:52PM

Originally posted by Henry Abbott from True Hoop, on January 3, 2007 6:14 PM

On December 23rd we headed into Manhattan with be's mom, sister, cousins and crew to see the Rockefeller Center tree. A strangely warm night with mobs of tourists reaped a small bag of roasted chestnuts from a street vendor, a warm, tasty sweet treat that be kindly shared with everyone.

The street vendor chestnuts awakended the deep inner cravings within the majority of us. The following night, be and his mom roasted about 1.5 lbs of chestnuts purchased from 2 supermarkets - i was in charge of the cleaning and the cutting - but the experience left us in utter disappointment. Not only were the chestnuts overcooked to the point of hard rockness, some of the chestnuts seemed powdery and moldy under the shells! I cried a little, inside of course.

As you know, be and i are quite stubborn people. I did a lot of research and attempt #2 rewarded us with 25 steaming hot, soft and easy-to-peel roasted bestnuts of goodness! They were so amazingly delicious but i could only eat 10 before giving up!

Now, about that mold issue (from Empire Chestnut):

At harvest time, chestnuts have a bland, starchy flavor and a crisp, carrot-like texture (they are about 50% water). As they dry, in a process called "curing", they become softer and some of the starch converts to sugar. At about 30% moisture, they are sweet, soft, and at the best stage to eat. Unfortunately, such cured chestnuts are very susceptible to mold, and should be promptly consumed. Fresh chestnuts should always be refrigerated in order to delay molding. Chestnuts will keep longer in the crispy, high-moisture condition than if they are stored in a cured condition.

Considering that most supermarkets offer chestnuts out in the open, no wonder mold develops! When we asked for chestnuts at our local Whole Foods, they retrieved them from the back and the nuts were kept very cold; good thing they know what's up. The chestnuts they had were also very large and blemish-free, deep brown and fresh looking.

I cleaned each chestnut with a damp towel and cut a long slash into the flat side with my small serrated knife. Many people suggest cutting an X into the rounded side, but having done both methods, the long slash on the flat side made it easier to peel. Next, i put them on a baking sheet into a 400 degree oven for 20 minutes, checking after 15 minutes by sticking a few chestnuts with a fork. At this point i also stirred them around a bit. At 20 minutes they were soft enough so i took them out to cool slightly. It's so rewarding when the shell peels off in 2 nice pieces to reveal a whole nut. Some of ours peeled perfectly but a few sticklers appeared in the bunch. They were all creamy sweet delicious, thankfully.

Check out this beautiful picture of Marrons! Chauds, chauds les mar-r-rons! With our second pound, we're going to roast them using our charcoal grill!

Originally from beXnlog by beXn reBlogged on Jan 3, 2007, 4:11PM

Originally posted by beXn from beXnlog, on January 3, 2007 6:14 PM

He's one of the best reporters in the NBA, and according to this report, Aldridge has been cut loose again--just after his extraordinary success in breaking the story of Allen Iverson's trade to Denver.

It's nothing personal at least--the Inquirer is in slash and burn mode and just laid off 71 people.

Originally from True Hoop by Henry Abbott reBlogged on Jan 3, 2007, 3:57PM

Originally posted by Henry Abbott from True Hoop, on January 3, 2007 6:14 PM

There's a fascinating conversation taking place across a couple of blogs, which Steven's post on leaving Brooklyn alterted me to. Douglas Rushkoff was mugged on Christmas Eve, and his wife Barbara blogged at length about her feelings at the time. (In short, "Screw this, we're leaving.")

But what's remarkable is that the entire conversation is happening so publicly. All of these people are semi-public, thanks to the work and writing that they do, but any of us can participate in the conversation. Somewhat predictably, the debate has essentially devolved into statistics and measurements being weighed against feelings and emotions.

I get defensive every time I see someone make the opposite move that I would, but in this case I was able to temper that by seeing the actual thoughts of people going through something terrifying and remarkable.

Originally from Anil Dash by Anil reBlogged

Originally posted by Anil from Anil Dash, on January 3, 2007 6:14 PM

tricia wang #2
Originally uploaded by triciawang 王 圣 㨗.

Tricia's new blog site! I'm moving the party over to Vox. After DavidJacobs and Adriana invited me - I've finally made the move. So change add this new VOX RSS or ATOM feed to your newsreaders.

This is my last post on Blogger - thanks for the hosting but I'm moving to a new home.

David keeps promising a script to move all my blogger.com posts over to Vox - and I am still holding him to it - but I'm gonna switch now. Vox is so much cooler than Blogger! Vox is the new thing. Vox is where I am at - Vox is where everyone is at. Vox is it. Vox Vox Vox Vox Vox Vox Vox VOX!

Originally from Hi Tricia! by Tricia Wang 王 圣 㨗 reBlogged

Originally posted by Tricia Wang 王 圣 㨗 from Hi Tricia!, on January 3, 2007 1:59 PM

The New York Times has published 3000 Faces, an interactive infographic of U.S. military casualties in the Iraq War, to-date:

Try the application at nytimes.com.

Casualties are classified according to age, race, service, duty, and time and location of death. The primary control for the graph affords selection of a variably-sized slice in time, for example the 52 weeks I have chosen in the screenshot above, between March 2004 and March 2005. This is the heaviest continuous one-year stretch of the war, encompassing the beginning of the campaign against al-Sadr, the second invasion of Fallujah, and the January 2005 Marine helicopter crash that killed 31.

All aspects of the chart react to the time slider: the date at top changes, breakdown charts in the middle adjust themselves, and location circles in the map on the right scale accordingly.

The time interface serves three functions:

1. It's a bar chart displaying the casualties per week over the almost four-year course of the war.
2. Small markers at the top note significant events, e.g. "Constitution approved" or "Saddam Hussein captured."
3. Input widget, for modifying the remainder of the graph.

The combination of display and interface in the time slider is strongly influenced by Google Finance:

Google Finance's central line graph also serves the same three functions: stock price display, news event markers, and input slider.

The entire casualty analysis application makes liberal use of tooltip-style information displays, which display detailed statistical information above the looser, less-detailed graphics:

Daniele Galiffa of Mentegrafica compares it to Minard's Napoleon's Retreat chart made famous by years of magazine advertisements for Edward Tufte seminars. He also says that improved understanding would result from additional data-mining features ("what was the worst day for white men?"), but I disagree. The tooltips demonstrate how selective hiding of information helps increase the overall information density of the graph, and the single input mechanism makes it a more accessible browsing tool for historical information. The pertinent information here is event-based, answering questions about the spikes in the chart, and offering direct links to significant points in the upper-right-hand corner. The one significant feature missing is the capacity to bookmark views into the data. Fortunately, there are only two possible variables for each view (start date, end date), but it would be interesting to provide a direct URL to the 52 weeks of heaviest casualties, above. For comparison, Google Finance also offers no way to link to a particular view that I'm aware of. Yahoo's new beta Finance charts do offer the fragment-style direct links first demonstrated by Kevin Lynch (e.g. this view of the same HAL data as the Google screenshot above), at the cost of an otherwise heavily over-featured application.

Martin Wattenberg and Fernanda Viegas's group at IBM is also doing some work in this direction, with their forthcoming Many Eyes project (look for "democratizing visualization" on this page). The two central features of Many Eyes that pique my interest are thumbnails and direct links to application states, simple technical additions that greatly multiply the usefulness of the application as a vehicle for argumentation or simple sharing.

Overall, I think the New York Times application is an example of serious, cutting-edge journalism, offering readers (?) a way to make and test theories about the progress of a long-term event. It's valuable in the same way as the terror alert vs. approval rating chart, and for many of the same reasons. The barrage of noise generated by the 24-hour news cycle is desperately in need of simplifying views that help illustrate co-occurence and possible causality of news events.

In contrast, John Emerson offers his own take on the latest milestone.

Originally from tecznotes reBlogged

Originally from tecznotes , on January 3, 2007 1:59 PM

Noka sells extremely expensive chocolate. The brand promise is based on exclusivity and purity of their product. And then this article came out on dallasfood.org questioning their misleading marketing and revealing how these products are actually created. Shortly after it was referred to on Boing Boing and the word-of-mouth quickly stormed on the internet.

It appears Noka hired a ‘crisis communication’ consultant who started posting on many discussion boards and blogs to defend Noka. Of course, his identity is discovered to total discredit of the Noka brand.

There are many things to learn here for the marketers. Deception in marketing has a high risk in today’s opinion-connected world.

Originally from Red Tail Blog by Red Tail Media reBlogged on Jan 2, 2007, 3:05AM

Originally posted by Red Tail Media from Red Tail Blog, on January 3, 2007 1:56 PM

also: '60s garage band cameos in TV & film  

Originally from Waxy.org Links reBlogged on Jan 2, 2007, 1:15AM

Originally from Waxy.org Links, on January 3, 2007 1:56 PM