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"byCycle.org's mission is to promote alternative forms of transportation by building software tools that help users plan safe trips and making those tools freely available to the public. Our main project at this time is an online bicycle trip planner. We plan to add features that will make it easier to plan mixed mode trips using public transportation as well."
"Ratatouille is a nearly flawless piece of popular art," writes A. O. Scott of the New York Times, in a review accompanied by this picture:
Stephanie Zacharek in Salon calls it "one of the most beautiful animated pictures I've ever seen," in a review accompanied by this picture:
Any student or critic of art, popular or unpopular, knows why these statements are wrong and what's missing from these images and these movies (also Shrek, the Incredibles, Toy Story, and the rest): line. For reasons mostly of budget and a kind of unthinking rush to modernize, filmmakers have thrown out possibly the central tool in the history of visual expression, and replaced it with tricks of sfumato and chiaroscuro that give objects a rounded, "realistic" look but make everything in the frame bulbous and doughy. It would be like making music with no "attack transients" (sharp sounds at the beginning of notes that give them their texture and bite)--all music would become billowy and ersatz, like New Age music. Years after photography mooted realistic painting in the world of portraits and "scenes," these Tinseltown hacks persist in imitating photographic depth, using computer short cuts, and the results are often simply grotesque (see above--eyes without lashes that are merely encircled by reptilian lids).
It's not a fluke that Toy Story "pioneer" Jon Lasseter worships Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki and has given his films a boost in the US. It's guilt from a fast food franchise owner at all the excellent cuisine he's displaced. Miyazaki is a poet of line.
So expressive! Whereas Pixar and its offspring have the smooth, slightly frozen look of '70s album cover illustration done with an airbrush:
A topic for another day: the Pixar movies are also the embodiment of Disney Values. The plucky little guy triumphs over adversity and learns a valuable lesson. Whereas in real life plucky little guys have boots in their faces all over town, while the big entities (such as entertainment conglomerates) grow more and more dominant.
"Encoded polylines store two types of encoded information for any given set of points: the latitude and longitudes of those points, and the maximum zoom levels to display these points. Levels are encoded using unsigned values, while point coordinates need to use signed values, so the encoding process is slightly different for each case."
hey, medical industry! counter the bad press with some Google ads!
A couple of weeks ago I said I wasn’t going to get a first-gen model, but seriously, did you really think I could stop myself? Really? While I’ve written extensively about the iPhone’s shortcomings (see here, and more recently here), we all know that whatever don’t-buy-anything willpower I may possess (OK, so I don’t have any of that) dissolves in the face of mobile gadgets, especially those from One Infinite Loop.
As hokey as it may sound, I just kind of felt like I was supposed to have one (and if you know me at all you saw that coming from a mile away). As one friend put it, “How else am I going to know if I should get one if I don’t have you to tell me?” I’m just playing my part. :)
Immediate impressions (likely colored by my “nerd high”)
- This first one is a biggie: I actually don’t have too much to complain about with regard to the keyboard. Can you believe that? I don’t know if it’s because of my SureType experience or what, but, well, it’s totally usable.
- There’s no denying that it’s absolutely gorgeous in every way — the screen, the design, the build quality — all wonderful.
- The UI is very responsive — it feels fast.
- Activation/setup through iTunes could not have gone faster/smoother.
- The “visual” voicemail feature is nice.
- It’s neat that text messages pop-up as you’re doing other things.
- The translucency used by some parts of the UI has to be seen in person to be fully appreciated.
- Everyone who doesn’t have one is going to want one (even if they don’t know it yet).
- I love having OS X in my pocket. ;)
- Safari is incredible.
- Google Reader finally has a decent mobile implementation and it has nothing to do with Google Reader. :P
- It’s got a phone!
Oh, and one last piece of advice for Motorola, Nokia, and Samsung: bow out gracefully.
Niggling complaints to follow.
But for one night they were two guys with a lot in common -- first in line to get an iPhone and wearing the same outfit."
bookmark this on del.icio.us - posted by stamen to iphone stevewozniak tenderloin apple - more about this bookmark...
Jason Kottke on Facebook.
Eventually, someone will come along and turn Facebook inside-out, so that instead of custom applications running on a platform in a walled garden, applications run on the internet, out in the open, and people can tie their social network into it if they want, with privacy controls, access levels, and alter-egos galore.
I just loved this film. Parker Posey is crazy, crazy, crazy in this film and I related to her a lot! I related so much it sort of scared me.
I don't want to tell you all to run out and see this movie because I know that what made me love it was how much I related to it. I know there are things wrong with it but I just decided that I did not care about those things. Once I made that decision, I just gave in to the film and adored it. Oh and I adored Parker Posey's clothes as well!
Oh, and not to objectify him but the French guy in this film is really hot! I wonder if French guys feel like they are stereotyped in US films. I am sure they do not mind.
Hello, iPhone.
Today we release our first application significant more so as a sign of whats to come from within our group:
If you have an iPhone, just navigate to this link:
http://rocketboom.com/iphone/Here is a demo of what it should look like(video flip not in demo):
http://rocketboom.com/iphone/demoConsidering we have never even tested it on an iPhone, we still have some work to do this weekend Im sure just to get v0.1 up to par.
This application is outstanding for us not because it's designed as yet another standalone Rocketboom player, but due to our primary intent to make it available as a player that anyone can easily customize for their own show.
There have been lots of things I've built for Rocketboom over the years, but Ive never had the resources to do anything with them or take them to the next level. I always wanted to for even more ideas come up than I could ever take action on.
Enter our superstar programmer Jamie Wilkinson who has been a saving grace the last few months. When we decided to take on this particular project about 3 days ago, Jamie put it together almost overnight. This weekend we'll test and spiffy up the player (still dedicated for Rocketboom) and next week, once we have a grip on the iphone standards, we hope to release the custom functionality so anyone can use it for their own show, or their own favorite shows.
I've always been really transparent about everything because I still dont believe in competition for the show, Rocketboom, but this is for a new business (along with RB and other shows in development) so the plan is to keep our other ideas under wraps until they are up. Nevertheless, we plan to work mostly within a GPL when spinning things off.
GNU General Public License Version 3. It occurs to me that book publishers stand to make good money from this; when does Totally Unauthorized GPLv3 Unleashed -- For Dummies! come out?
Check out Ars Technica's first unboxing photos of the iPhone as the review begins its writing process.
It's the day for the Apple iPhone to be released to the public, and the public is doing its job to feed into the media frenzy. If you're not on line waiting for the iPhone, you've either seen people waiting on line or mocked people waiting on line (while secretly coveting one, of course). WCBS has some photographs of people on line this morning - someone even brought his dog, which is named Beta! David Clayman, second in line, has been blogging about his waiting at iPhone Adventure. And earlier this week, on the luck of seven interviewed the person at the head of the line, Greg Packer, and Clayman - here's the video.
We'll be updating this post with updates, so let us know what you're seeing and hearing. So far, we hear that the line is only 10 deep at AT&T stores. Which makes sense, because who wants to be the dope waiting outside the AT&T store? And we'll be at the release tonight, possibly wearing body armor. Update: This comes in from Fox News. They were doing a live report with a Newsweek columnist Steven Levy, and someone just walked up during the interview and tried to grab his iPhone, but gets the mic instead. Looks like our prediction is very real. Gizmodo is using Justin.TV technology to live video broadcast from the SF line. Interesting if you want to experience the line, but from the comfort of your own home. CollegeHumor comes at us with their first in a series of iPhone spoofs, just in time for launch. This one is focused on the visual voice mail feature. WCBS 880 got some video of people at the head of the line at Fifth Avenue (video below). Apparently the people have been sponsored by companies to take advantage of the media attention - the people are either paid or wearing free-t-shirts. If a personal hygiene product isn't offering deodorants, we think a great opportunity is lost. Top photographs of people outside the Fifth Avenue Apple Store by Matthew Stanton/CBS; lower photograph of the Soho Apple Store by your pal Matt on Flickr
Another Mac geotagging application to add to an already surprisingly large pile: Magrathea. Free (donationware), integrates with iLife and Flickr. Via Geotagging Flickr. Previously: More Mac Geotagging Utilities; Geophoto: Mac Geotagging Software; GPS, Geotagging Automator Actions for the Mac;...
Google Maps Is Changing the Way We See the World, from Wired's July issue, is a far-reaching state-of-the-topic article that looks at Google's mapmaking ventures and the tremendous amount of amateur mapmaking it's stimulated. Covers all the bases. Noteworthy: "Today,...
As much as we like to blame the RIAA for all the evils of the recording industry, leave it to my boy Prince to bring out the best in the execs over in the U.K. And mind you, these are music retailers, not even the people who, despite their extortionate ways, might actually have once helped an artist with production or distribution.
The Entertainment Retailers Association’s co-chairman Paul Quirk couldn’t help himself at an industry conference:
“It would be yet another example of the damaging covermount culture which is destroying any perception of value around recorded music. The Artist Formerly Known as Prince should know that with behaviour like this he will soon be the Artist Formerly Available in Record Stores. And I say that to all the other artists who may be tempted to dally with the Mail on Sunday.”So, what’s the transgression that made this guy lash out at Prince, and threaten “artists who may be tempted to dally”? Prince is giving away free CDs with the Mail on Sunday newspaper. Oh, the humanity! And he’s done this before, of course; His 2004 CD Musicology was given away for free at all of his concerts that year, though U.S. retailers were a lot more quiet with their grumblings. I do like that the tension between the death of the record industry and the decline in circulation of print has pitted these two behemoths against each other, however.
Keep in mind — this isn’t some low-level spokesperson for this industry group, this was the co-chairman of the organization, one of the guys in charge. Thus, when I read this story, I realized the only one who could possibly be cackling more loudly than me was Prince himself. Aside from performing, I think his greatest joy in life is to make stodgy old guys so mad they get flustered and start sputtering.
Oh, and the new album Planet Earth features the return of Wendy & Lisa and will probably actually have some good songs, too. I am tempted to dally with it.
via migurski, via pownce - very matta-clark ish
Jerry Baker has been riding in the Northwest since the roads were dirt, back when shorts were wool, chamois were leather, and you switched gears by removing the wheel and flipping it around. Here’s Jerry with a new Davidson
Save Me :: Lauryn does Nina Simone
The saddest thing we've ever known? Nah, it's probably the drugs. Lee Hildebrand breaks down the fan revolt at Lauryn Hill's Oakland concert:Her hair in an unkempt rust-colored Afro, Hill wore a green-and-yellow plaid jacket that appeared to be made of wool and an ankle-length black skirt, looking not unlike a bag lady one might encounter at a taco truck on International Boulevard. She held a microphone in her right hand and a black handkerchief in her left, frequently wiping sweat from her face as she paced the stage.
At one point during the show, the singer tripped and fell, landing flat on her backside. "That's what I get for wearing high heels," she said as she rose to her feet.
...
Some concertgoers who had paid as much as $89.50 for tickets were requesting refunds even before Hill hit the stage -- two hours and 15 minutes after the concert's scheduled 7:30 start and 80 minutes after the opening act, Jupiter Rising, had finished its set...Other patrons started their exits during her first song, and the trickle turned to a flow after a speech late in the show during which the vocalist attempted to explain her new musical direction.
"When you're young, gifted and black -- and female -- you have to have a lot of endurance," she said, borrowing from the title of a song made famous by Nina Simone, a singer who'd had a somewhat similar meltdown more than three decades earlier.
"I can't fit into a stereotype that makes me comfortable for you," she added. "If that makes me feel uncomfortable to you, I need to find some new company."
In response to this previous post, Matthew Foster sends this great link to a series of publications dissecting the 2007 Farm Bill. Check the right hand column of the page under “Understanding the Farm Bill.” Matthew is a graphic designer at the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy and has done a fantastic job. The bold WPA-inspired graphics and typography make me want to pick up these reports — and evoke an nostalgic image of the American farmer back before it was big Agribusiness. The reports provide overviews of the Farm Bill and its implications as well as IATP’s policy recommendations to make the Farm Bill fairer for the U.S. and the world. A beautiful and compelling way to spread the word on an often overlooked and vitally central policy matter.
Update: Yeah, OK, so my current blog design uses WPA imagery, too. I like it.
The world of serious sandwiches suffered a terrible loss this week with the death of Al Langer at the ripe (or should I say cured) old age of 94. I got the news in an e-mail from David Sax, a Canadian food writer who is on a mission to save Jewish deli food.
Langer and his wife Jean founded Los Angeles' only great Jewish deli in 1947. His pastrami, made to his specifications, was a peppery, smokey ode to Jewish soul food. When I wrote favorably about Langer's pastrami in the New York Times, I was practically stoned by New York deli afficionados the next time I walked into Katz's. They might as well have put a "fatwa" on me.
Read more to discover what Nora Ephron, our poet laureate, said about Langer's. And find out how to get Langer's Pastrami shipped to your house so that you can have a Langer's pastrami party in Art's honor.
Placed on still-warm rye bread, Langer's pastrami made more than a "nice" sandwich. It was, as Nora Ephron, our pastrami poet laureate, wrote in the New Yorker, a "work of art." Here are a couple of choice Ephron Langer's pastrami bites:
"The rye bread, faintly sour, perfumed with caraway seeds, lightly dusted with cornmeal, is as good as any rye bread on the planet, and Langer's puts about seven ounces of pastrami on it, the proper proportion of meat to bread."
"The resulting sandwich, slathered with Gulden's mustard, is an exquisite combination of textures and tastes. It's soft but crispy, tender but chewy, peppery but sour, smoky but tangy. It's a symphony orchestra, different instruments brought together to play one perfect chord."
Ephron goes on to say that if Langer's was in New York, "it would be a shrine."
There are three great pastrami sandwiches to be had in this country:
Langer's, 704 S. Alvarado St., Los Angeles, CA, 213-483-8050
Katz's, 205 E. Houston Street (corner of Ludlow St.), New York, NY 212-254-2246
Ben's Best, 96-40 Queens Boulevard, Rego Park, Queens, New York, 718-897-1700
Rounding out my top six are: Carnegie Deli, Artie's, and Zingerman's in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
Amazingly, you can get all three of my favorite pastramis by mail. But if you get it, try to buy a whole, uncut piece and then steam it slowly to approximate the real deli experience.
With great delis seemingly in peril all over North America it's heartening to know that Norm Langer, Art's son, will continue to run the business adhering to his father's high standards. Wherever you are this weekend, serious eaters, have a pastrami sandwich and a Dr. Brown's soda, and before you take your first bite, toast Art Langer, a true Serious Eater. And remember, if Art Langer lived to 94, maybe someday researchers will discover that pastrami has the same health benefits as red wine. Eat pastrami, live longer.
[pastrami photo taken by Ben Brown]
“Ratatouille” is a nearly flawless piece of popular art, as well as one of the most persuasive portraits of an artist ever committed to film. The New York Times weighs in with its review. The movie opens today and I can't wait to go back and see it again!
comments are open
Fresh from the Glastonbury festival, Lily Allen was formally arrested yesterday after turning herself into police. The singer had her photo taken and gave a DNA sample in the West End of London. Police said, "She was arrested in connection with an allegation of assault and bailed to return in July."The singer had previously been questioned by authorities about an incident where she allegedly karate kicked a paparazzi photographer outside a nightclub in March. The celebrity snapper complained to police that Lily "went berserk."
I would have loved to see Lily doing some Judo moves! Now why didn't someone get a picture of that?
Making Public Space. When it opened its doors to the community, Public School 503/506 in Sunset Park, Brooklyn became the largest public open space within more than 10 blocks. What started in 1999 as an afterschool program for youth has subsequently become a vibrant “Neighborhood Center,” engaging the local community and expanding far beyond the original vision.
Picking up on this success, Mayor Bloomberg has proposed opening 290 city schoolyards to the public during non-school hours as part of his PlaNYC 2030. But “simply unlocking the gates,” could spell disaster without learning from Sunset Park. The Center for New York City Affairs tells a brief history of the program and makes its own recommendations.
Earlier in the week, I made a comment in passing in a post about Vimeo:
you do know that Facebook is AOL 2.0, right?
A few people picked up on it and speculated what I might have meant by it. In reading those posts and poking around a bit, I found a post that Scott Heiferman made just after Facebook Platform launched in May:
While at Sony in 1994, I was sent to Virginia to learn how to build a Sony "app" on AOL (the #3 online service, behind Compuserve & Prodigy at the time) using AOL's proprietary "rainman" platform.
Fast forward to Facebook 2007 and see similarities: If you want access to their big base of users, develop something in their proprietary language for their people who live in their walled garden.
Scott pretty much nails it here. I've no doubt that Facebook is excited about their new platform (their userbase is big enough that companies feel like they have to develop for it) and it's a savvy move on their part, but I'm not so sure everyone else should be happy about it. What happens when Flickr and LinkedIn and Google and Microsoft and MySpace and YouTube and MetaFilter and Vimeo and Last.fm launch their platforms that you need to develop apps for in some proprietary language that's different for each platform? That gets expensive, time-consuming, and irritating. It's difficult enough to develop for OS X, Windows, and Linux simultaneously...imagine if you had 30 different platforms to develop for.
As it happens, we already have a platform on which anyone can communicate and collaborate with anyone else, individuals and companies can develop applications which can interoperate with one another through open and freely available tools, protocols, and interfaces. It's called the internet and it's more compelling than AOL was in 1994 and Facebook in 2007. Eventually, someone will come along and turn Facebook inside-out, so that instead of custom applications running on a platform in a walled garden, applications run on the internet, out in the open, and people can tie their social network into it if they want, with privacy controls, access levels, and alter-egos galore.
Right, so I feel totally swamped right now, mostly by e-mails and a general feeling of not enough time in the day.
Two big interesting things have happened in the past week: Tom and I went to O'Reilly's FOO Camp in Sebastopol, an invitation-only hootenany attended by a variety of nerds. Among other talks and sessions, Kevin Slavin gave an understated, epic rundown of Area/code's relationship to that one meme about how kids don't roam nearly as far from home as they used. Kevin neatly tied up a bunch of threads about location, technology, television, and media, and my life is the richer for it.
The other thing is that Pownce launched. Our own Shawn Allen built the Adobe AIR desktop client for this messaging application, and large chunks of the project were conceived and perfected in our office. I've been close to the work and participated in a number of API design discussions. There's a bunch of noise about how it's like-Twitter-this, and isn't-it-just-email-that, but it's a stake in the ground, fun to use, and has a bright future.
Die Hard 4 might be the perfect summer entertainment. I couldn't believe how much fun this movie was...we wanted to go again as soon as we got out.
Rating: 4.5/5.0
This instructional website at Nippon Ham teaches you how to turn a boring tube of meat into something that kind of resembles a bunny. Or a duck. Or a hippo. Or a sheep. Now you can fulfill that lifelong dream of creating a menagerie of flesh colored animals with just the power of a knife and a pack of ham-based weiners!
TED speaker and NYTimes tech columnist David Pogue (TED06 speech) has been testing the Apple iPhone, which will hit stores tomorrow Friday in the US, and he shows it all on video, feature by feature, dressed with classic Pogue fun. Or you can read his article. Summary: "much of the hype and some of the criticisms are justified. The iPhone is revolutionary; it’s flawed ... it does things no phone has ever done before; it lacks features found even on the most basic phones."
Legendary New York eatery Shopsin's reopened last week, in its latest incarnation at the Essex Street Market. A few years back, after inhabiting the same cramped space in Greenwich Village for decades, Shopsin's moved a few blocks to a bigger space. When that outpost closed late last year, some observers feared it was the end of the road for Kenny, the beloved and eccentric restaurateur. If you want to know meet the man, you've got a couple of options: 1. Find no more than three of your closest friends and visit the new space, where you can sample any of Kenny's hundreds of menu choices, or 2. Visit Netflix and cue up Matt Mahurin's 2004 documentary, I Like Killing Flies, which depicts the final months of the original location and documents Kenny's unique approach to food, life, and hospitality. It's a fascinating portrait of a profound, profane iconoclast. It's safe to say that Kenny's one of the most amazing characters in the restaurant business. The DVD also goes on sale in late September at Amazon
and your finer video retailers.
Previously on Serious Eats: Last Brunch at Shopsin's
A report from Citizen Action of New York suggests that Manhattan juries have "strong racial and ethnic disparities in the people who show up to serve." While whites are just more than half of Manhattan's population, about three-quarters of juries are made up of whites. The group had some suggestions on how to change that:
The report recommends that these steps be taken by court officials on the state and local levels Manhattan County Clerk administers court selection in the borough): - broadening the state juror source list -- the list from which county court officials draw summoned for jury service -- to reflect the real racial and ethnic population of Manhattan, such means as adding names from city directories, and community organizations; - sending a higher proportion of qualifications questionnaires and summonses to communities a higher proportion of people of color and Hispanics, to compensate for their lower response rates; - updating juror source list addresses more frequently, from annually to semi-annually, compensate for the higher mobility of people of color and Hispanics; and - increasing state regulation of county use of juror source lists to ensure that the pool of prospective jurors available for a particular trial is racially and ethically balanced.The NY Times spoke to the County Clerk, Norman Goodman, who said "personal injury lawyers had complained to him about the high proportion of white professionals serving on juries" because working-class juries tend "to be more generous in granting financial damages to plaintiffs." Goodman also said sending more notices to certain neighborhoods might be unconstitutional. Have you noticed if juries you've served on are particularly white? Gothamist had jury duty last year, and the waiting room seemed very diverse, as did the pool that was called in.
I thought about trying to coordinate another NYC visit with the Boredoms 77 Boa Drum Show, but it won’t work out. You east coasters should go since it’s free.
Legendary Japanese iconcolasts BOREDOMS, a visionary band who has spent over twenty years pushing itself toward new frontiers, will stage the most extraordinary concert of their career on July 7, 2007. A once-in-a-lifetime performance featuring 77 drummers, and meant to be performed just once (on 7/7/07), BOREDOMS will create 77BOADRUM as a free show in the Empire-Fulton Ferry State Park section of Brooklyn Bridge Park.
Located directly on the East River and majestically framed by the Brooklyn and Manhattan Bridges, the Empire-Fulton Ferry State Park section of Brooklyn Bridge Park provides an arresting stage for this audacious performance.
A Comicbook Orange is really hitting its stride now, so I’m embedding it again. I honestly don’t know what more comic book fans would need. Girl in Wonder Woman costume? Check. The same girl talking straight in the next segment about why a new comic sucks? Check check. Go, Casey! Everyone else, spread the word. If you’re trying to make your limited comic-buying funds stretch and only get the good stuff, if you want to find out why people like comics, or if you just want to be entertained for a few minutes — you should be watching this show.
Apple announced this morning that customers at its stores will be able to get twice as many iPhones as those at AT&T stores. Well okay, maybe that's just two per person. But still.
As a sure sign that cognitive improvement games have gone mainstream, Nicole Kidman has been announced as the new face of Nintendo's latest 'brain training' title.
The idea that mental training will actually help boost your mental skills is relatively new.
It was traditionally thought that the mind and brain just start losing their edge after young adulthood and your best hope was to learn to use your remaining resources more effectively as you age.
However, studies started to appear in the late 1990s suggesting that practicing certain tasks could act as a sort of 'mental workout', actually improving mental abilities directly in people with disorders like Alzheimer's disease and schizophrenia.
Most people weren't fully convinced of the benefits in healthy older people until a key study was published last year in the Journal of the American Medical Association that showed modest but reliable improvements, even after five years.
The effects were typically small (often too small to be picked up without standard tests), but interestingly, the training also had a knock-on effect on the participants' ability to look after themselves effectively on a day-to-day basis.
It seems that cognitive training may have a stronger effect in people with mental impairments. A recent review of 17 studies found a positive effect on mental abilities, everyday activities and mood in people with Alzheimer's.
However, as far as I know, no controlled trials have ever been published on any off-the-shelf 'brain training' game, including Nintendo's. You'd guess from the medical literature that they might have a similar effect, but it's yet to be shown for sure.
Link to BBC News article 'Kidman to be new face of Nintendo'.
Link to JAMA article 'Long-term Effects of Cognitive Training...'
MacRumors has confirmed that the forthcoming version of iTunes Music Store.
Users will be able to right-click on purchased songs and select "Make into Ringtone," which will give them a small audio workspace to select the 30 seconds they want to use as a new ringtone.
According to MacRumors, the use of this feature will cost $.99 per track--a fee which goes toward licensing the music for your mobile phone. That means the total fee for a ringtone is $1.98.
[via Crave]
Hey thanks for chatting with us, Vincent!
"In September 2006, a group of African American high school students in Jena, Louisiana, asked the school for permission to sit beneath a 'whites only' shade tree. There was an unwritten rule that blacks couldn't sit beneath the tree. The school said they didn't care where students sat. The next day, students arrived at school to see three nooses (in school colors) hanging from the tree." Read more about the Jena 6 at While Seated and BBC News. (link)
Posted by Mendel Chuang, Product Marketing Manager
Just a few months after Google Desktop became available for the Mac, I'm happy to tell you it's now available for Linux users too. Google Desktop for Linux makes searching your computer as easy as searching the web with Google. Not only can you rediscover important documents that have been idling on your hard drive for years, but you can also search through emails saved in Gmail or other applications. All office files, including documents and slides created with OpenOffice.org can be easily found. Since some Linux users are program developers, Google Desktop was designed with the ability to search source codes and information contained in .pdf, .ps, .man and .info documents. It also features the Quick Search Box ,which you can call up by pressing the Ctrl key twice. Type a few letters or words into the search box and your top results pop up instantly. Keeping with a global focus, you can use it in English, French, Italian, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean --and it works with many versions of Linux too.
With this launch, Google Desktop is now available for Windows, Mac, and Linux. Try it out now and read more on the Google Desktop Blog.
I’m at a point in my life know where I actually know real authors of real books. It’s strange, because these are regular, ‘one pant leg at a time’ human folk like you and me, and yet somehow they’ve managed to articulate a real, honest to goodness view of the world… and they’ve convinced other folks to print it for them. Now you can buy these books via the Interweb and even hold them in your hand. It’s amazing to me.
So, having said that, now I’m going to plug two of them.
Words About Pictures
“Seventy-nine Short Essays on Design” by Michael Bierut is just out and it’s exactly what the title says: a compendium of several dozen of Bierut’s insightful, entertaining and ambitious writings over the past few decades.
It’s no secret that Bierut is at the top of this profession for many reasons, not the least of which is that he possesses a rare, once-in-a-generation brand of visual intelligence. I think my favorite reason, though, is that he complements that with a passion for and dedication to the written word; he has consistently and persistently sought to bring clarity to the fuzzy complexities of graphic design by doing the difficult work of writing about it. I’ve said it many times, but I truly believe that design writing is a crucial part of the future growth of our craft, and in that way, at least, this book is a kind of treasure. I find it really inspirational.
The Complete History of Information in 238 Pages
I’m even more wowed by the debut book from my colleague at The New York Times, information architect extraordinaire Alex Wright. The book is called “Glut: Mastering Information Through the Ages” and it’s stunningly ambitious in scope.
I’m four chapters into it, and already Alex’s prose has taken me on a whirlwind tour of the evolution of information — tracing the epigenetic origins of how we organize data as far back as primordial bacteria, and as far afield as Greek mythological genealogy, Aztec libraries and the very first accountants.
In part it’s an exhaustive academic thesis, but it’s also genuinely entertaining and surprisingly relevant. We often think of the ‘new world’ we’re building online as a fresh slate and without precedent, but Alex shows how incorrect that truly is, and how much we have to learn from what’s come before.
Cover Stories
I highly, highly recommend both of these, but of course, one is an easier sell than the other. Michael’s book comes with the imprimatur of the upper echelons of graphic design practice, and it’s packaged in a beautiful hardback cover wittily designed by his Pentagram colleague Abbott Miller. On the other hand, Alex’s book comes in a rather underwhelmingly designed package that looks like it was lifted from an undergraduate textbook from the mid-Nineties. It’s a shame really, because it’s an amazing piece of work… don’t judge it by its cover.
Now Let Me Tell You About My Book
Speaking of books, people ask me from time to time if I’ve thought about writing a book. Well, as a matter of fact, I have… but thinking about it hasn’t magically produced a manuscript, as it turns out.
Seriously, I have intentions to write a book, but they’re just intentions and I haven’t figured out yet how I can actually get it done. I think part of the reason is that most of the serious interest publishers have expressed in having me write a book has been along the lines of a technical how-to, something that might be called “Awesome CSS Grids” or something. There’s value in that kind of book, for sure. But it’s not the kind of book I want to write.
I have no reservations about writing about grids, but I prefer something higher-level, more theoretical, and less tactical. I guess the problem is that I don’t exactly know what kind of book I want to write, which as you can imagine, makes it difficult to write a book. I know I want it to be higher level, and I know I want it to be the kind of book that has a certain amount of timelessness, but beyond that, it’s all rather unformed.
Really, you know what I should do? I should just stop complaining about this on my blog and sit down and just write the damn thing.
I've been talking a bit with Eddie Elliott, local designer/technologist and all-around raconteur whose beautiful digitial work predates the web, about Cabspotting lately. We (Stamen) keep meaning to get back to the project and do some new investigation, but something else (i.e. paid work that we like to do) keeps getting in the way. Eddie's stepped into this gap, and been using the Cabspotting API to produce some really stunning work. You can read more about it at a page he made for it at http://cabs.lightmoves.net/—in particular I like the calculations of the center of gravity over time, and he's pointed out an error in how we're plotting latitude vs. longitude (ouch)—but it's the high-res long-term point maps of San Francisco that make me the happiest, and provide some interesting new ways to look at the city through the data it throws off.
So first of all Eddie's using dots instead of lines, which makes sense over longer periods of time. This image shows 5,744,623 cab-spots (what Eddie calls individual cab GPS locations), recorded over the course of 31 days (44,640 minutes) from March 21st to April 21st, 2007, and it's just lovely:
What I love about blog/media sites is that in the midst of hard news coverage there are occasional posts of babies and sometimes even cats. Josh Marshall's photos of his kid Sam are sandwiched between a post about a CNN poll on Iraq and Cheney's lawyer backing down on the claim of a "fourth branch" theory of government.
Wow -- I don't remember the last time I saw Janet Jackson with curly hair. It's so... LaToya of her. I know that it's a wig or weave or whatever, but I kinda dig it. You?
Ignore those pretenders, who are simply grasping at fame and acclaim with their assertions that they've got the scoop. You know who has the real contacts, the real info, the real dirt -- and that who's name isn't Suzy-Loo.
It's me... is what I'm getting at.
Look, I talked to Apple's top, TOP brass at WWDC, and while, you know, they couldn't come right out and SAY what's happening with Leopard, well, let's just say they said ENOUGH. Enough so I could piece together this very detailed roadmap of Leopard's development:
July:
- A handful of new features will be added -- ones that didn't make it the WWDC beta, but were clearly needed. Not many! (It's too close to release.)
- Bugs will be squashed -- 'regression' bugs will be given special priority.
- Performance will continue to be improved.
- Special emphasis will be placed on not introducing any new bugs at this stage.
- If a build seems particularly solid, we may see an interim beta released for developers.
August:
- Only a couple of new features will be added -- ones that didn't make it in July, but are absolutely needed. The number will be extremely limited.
- More bugs will be fixed -- most attention will be given to things that used to work in Tiger, but don't any more.
- Even more performance tuning!
- "No new bugs" will be the goal.
- Depending on conditions, Apple may release a beta just to developers, to test against.
September:
- The smallest possible number of new features will be added -- only ones that didn't make it in August, but are totally necessary. These will require special approval!
- Bugs fixing will be at a feverish pace -- especially bugs introduced in Leopard!
- The system will see speedups throughout, BUT...
- It will be unacceptable to introduce any regressions at this point.
- Developers may get a beta during September, if the build seems very solid, and Apple wants to verify it.
October:
- Leopard!
- Unless it's delayed, in which case my sources say it'll come out later.
--
Hopefully I don't get my friends at Apple in trouble with this incredibly detailed peek inside their software process! Hopefully if I've revealed too much, my friends at Apple Legal will send me a cease and desist and I'll get even MORE PUBLICITY FOR MY SITE.
With less than four days until the Apple iPhone finally hits shelves across the country, anticipation is reaching a boiling point. This $600 device (for 8gb, $500 for 4gb) is following the tradition set down by generations (and repeated recently with the PS3), fan boys are starting to amass in the time honored tradition of excessive line waiting. The honor of first in line goes to two gentlemen whom Gizmodo interviewed at the Fifth Avenue Apple Store yesterday. The first two at the Soho store arrived this morning. They're clad with shirts advertising for Keep a Child Alive and plan to auction off the iPhone for Charity. Noteworthy:
Regardless, if you are first on line or are turning away from the screen right now, it would be hard for one to argue the significance of this device. We leave you with this, which to us summarizes the power of this phone on the average user. When the guided tour video was shown to a patient techno-loathing wife, we were shocked by her excitement and the quote: "This seems more like evil magic than technology." In the end, it's people like her that are going to give iPhone a future. And its ability to be used by people who aren't tech-savvy will rate its success. What's made Apple successful so far is largely its simplicity, it's what they do best.
- Apple has a 20 minute guided tour detailing iPhone functionality. If you are on the fence about the phone, don't watch this - you will be pushed over.
- Apple on setup and plan costs
- Steve Jobs was profiled in New York Magazine last week. They talk about Job's well documented working behavior, and whether Apple's luck will run out with the iPhone.
- David Pogue reviews the iPhone for the New York Times. There is even a video to watch. It's interesting to see a reviewers hands finally.
- CNet Top 5: iPhone waiting-line essentials
- NY Post "reviews" the iPhone (the article doesn't sound like he even touched it)
- Walt Mossberg chimes in
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Check out this adorable (or at least, it starts out adorable) and creative sketchbook that Hope Larson compiled with the help of fellow artists at the MoCCA festival this past weekend. Shown here are the first two pages by Hope and husband Bryan Lee O’Malley.
People who are interested in the software shouldn’t have to read the acres of prose in the mod_atom intro, so I’ll just keep this one up to date.
2007/06/27
Updated iterator.c to fix pkeane’s bug while retaining concurrency safety.
Tested on a vanilla Debian box, and the compiler there emitted a couple of warnings one of which turned out to be an actual bug (that the unit tests hadn’t caught, sigh). Whatever, it ran fine. Like I said, programs written in the C language are portable. Write Once Run Anywhere, baby. Well, with APR anyhow.
Rebecca Charles, owner of the Pearl Oyster Bar in NYC, a seafood place modeled after hundreds of similar restaurants in New England offering similar menus, is suing a former employee (of six years) for copying too closely her restaurant and menu in opening his new place, Ed's Lobster Bar.
Many parallels here to the design/art/film world...what is mere inspiration versus outright theft? The key question in these kinds of cases for me is: does the person exercise creativity in the appropriation? Did they add something to it instead of just copying or superficially changing it? Clam shacks are everywhere in New England, but an upscale seafood establishment with a premium lobster roll is a unique creative twist on that concept brought to NYC by Charles. An upscale clam shack blocks away from a nearly identical restaurant at which the owner used to work for six years...that seems a bit lame to me, not the work of a creative restaurateur. Who knows how this stuff is going to play out legally; it's a complex issue with lots of slippery slope potential.
Meg has more thoughts on the issue and Ed Levine weighs in over at Serious Eats with information not found in the NY Times article. It was Ed who first raised the issue about Ed's Lobster Bar earlier in the month.
Update: I forgot to link to the menus above. Here's the menu for Pearl Oyster Bar and here's the menu for Ed's Lobster Bar. For comparison, here are the menus for a couple of traditional clam shacks: the Clam Box in Ipswitch, MA and Woodman's in Essex, MA.
ongoing: “This is a stripped-down implementation of the server side of the Atom Publishing Protocol as an Apache module, implemented in C.”
kevin, leah, daniel and stamen's new thing
The Mangosteen is coming. I had one in Vancouver, B.C. a couple of years ago, and it was lusciously delicious. The late Johnny Apple would be so happy. Here's a tiny portion of what he wrote about his craving for mangosteens in the Times in 2003. I will certainly toast Johnny when I taste my first mangosteen in New York.
I'm a big-time mangosteen addict, which presents problems.
The mangosteen -- a tropical fruit about the size of a tangerine, whose leathery maroon shell surrounds moist, fragrant, snow-white segments of ambrosial flesh -- can't get a visa. Mangosteens may not legally be imported into the United States. They may not legally be shipped to the mainland from Hawaii, where a few sturdy souls have lately begun to grow them anyway.
Here in Thailand and elsewhere in Southeast Asia, notably Vietnam and Singapore, people buy them by the bagful for small change. In Vancouver and other Canadian cities with big Asian populations, you can find them at street markets and greengrocers. In Paris, Fauchon will sell you one for a prince's if not quite a king's ransom.
But back home in Washington, the best I can do without jumping on a plane is the wooden mangosteen, handsomely carved and oiled, that sits on my desk there.
So what, you may say. What's he getting worked up about? He can gobble up papayas, mangoes and even rambutans when he gets a tropical itch. In the summer, he can eat perfectly ripe peaches, still warm from the tree, and dark, sweet plums whose juices squirt out when a tooth breaks through their taut skins.
Friends have accused me of craving mangosteens because they are beyond my reach, the way children in the old Soviet Union craved oranges. Not guilty, say I.
No other fruit, for me, is so thrillingly, intoxicatingly luscious, so evocative of the exotic East, with so precise a balance of acid and sugar, as a ripe mangosteen. I thought so when I first tasted one half a lifetime ago, in Singapore, and I've thought so ever since. I'd rather eat one than a hot fudge sundae, which for a big Ohio boy is saying a lot.
I know I’m late to the party, but I hadn’t seen the Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition of Gravity’s Rainbow featuring cover artwork by Frank Miller till yesterday. I guess the rumor is that Pynchon, while not being stalked by CNN, hanging out in bus stations, or impersonating a bag lady in northern California) requested Miller. Of course, maybe he didn’t.
Congrats to the Vimeo team on the launch of the latest version of the site. Here's the announcement post. The login/signup page is awesome. I also like how Vimeo has found room in the crowded video-on-the-web field, even though YouTube dominates the space. Vimeo is to YouTube as Facebook is to MySpace...not in terms of closed versus open (you do know that Facebook is AOL 2.0, right?) but in terms of being a bit more well thought out and not as, well, ugly (and not just in the aesthetic sense). (link)
A five-minute crash course in constitutional law by Walter Delinger, former Solicitor General to the Supreme Court and current law professor at Duke. (link)
Ed's Lobster Bar is much more than a knock-off. It's an exact duplicate of Pearl. Thirty-one of the 34 dishes on his menu are simply lifted from Pearl. Serious Eats has more on the oyster bar lawsuit, including many details that don't appear in the New York Times article. Sounds like it's more of an outright copy than that article lead me to believe. Still, I fear a dangerous precedent if she succeeds with this suit.
comments are open
It’s long been my belief that the perceived dichotomy between design and development, a dichotomy that is often fostered by both, exists to the detriment of both. The potential negative impact of of this dichotomy has increased as recent developments continue to challenge us. To use Ajax and RIA’s effectively requires expertise that spans both design and development. On another front entirely, as we move into the realm of service design, we enter a territory whose constraints and possibilities are unfamiliar to us.
This was brought to mind again several months ago as I was listening to a presentation given by a hardware designer. In discussing how closely, or not, some hardware designers work with manufacturers he posited a dichotomy between design integrity and manufacturing priorities. My hackles rose instantly. The implication was that there was some clear and pure design vision and that anything that pushed back against it was to be avoided. Including, evidently, the real world. Clear design vision is a wonderful thing but it doesn’t mean that there are not real physical and manufacturing constraints to building products that designers should be aware of. I was disheartened but not surprised to hear a sentiment so familiar to us in the web applications world. Designers can be deeply distrustful of the developers that are actually going to make their visions and ideas real.
Here is one of the few effective keys to the design problem — the ability of the designer to recognize as many of the constraints as possible — his willingness and enthusiasm for working within these constraints. Constraints of price, of size, of strength, of balance, of surface, of time and so forth.
- Charles Eames
Developers work in an environment of constraints. There are only so many developers or a limited amount of time. The database will only fetch the data so fast. There is often amongst developers, just like designers, a strong desire to find technically elegant solutions. These elegant solutions are not reached by being willfully ignorant of the constraints or being negligent about learning what is actually possible. But, whether or not an elegant solution can be found, the ultimate metric of success for developers is “Does it work?”.
So what do we do? One simple answer is that we work more closely together. This is easier with smaller teams. Significant web applications can and are being built with fewer than 10 people involved from start to finish. Even in cases where larger teams are unavoidable, approaches that involve prototyping or some sort of iterative cycle can be useful. Aside from their other benefits, these approaches can ‘game’ the corporate structure to get the right people in the same rooms on a regular basis. With increased exposure, both developers and designers get a much better sense of each other’s expertise and concerns. With increased exposure we both get better at finding the place where the possible and the ideal come together. Most importantly, we get to align behind the realization that we are all trying to build an application that we’re proud of and we’re trying to do it together.
From last year, but one of my favorite things I've ever written for this site: Strawberry Fields Forever, a look at my family's strawberry growing tradition. I haven't made it there yet this year so I've been forced to eat local berries. And I have to say the berries at the Greenmarket here in New York pale in comparison to my grandfather's.
comments are open
Picasa Web Albums, Google's photo sharing site, now has geotagging: photos can be placed on a map; visitors can view an album's photos on a map or from within Google Earth. It's more limited than what you can do with...
Scott McCloud promised that the web was going to make distribution of lone-creator comics work, and he was right. The way to keep up with these things is via RSS feeds, and the artists generally seem to understand I've never in my life paid attention to comics, but now there are a few that I check up on regularly.
Wondermark is David Malki's bi-weekly (Tuesdays and Fridays) strip with artwork yanked from old-timey expired copyright illustrations, funny captions appended.
Perry Bible Fellowship is sometimes a bit raw, but Nicholas Gurewitch also uses it to experiment with a variety of drawing styles.
Cat And Girl is a long-running series featuring snarky literary references. I own an apparently-no-longer-in-print CnG Rube Goldberg t-shirt.
Penny Arcade is mostly about video games. I don't really play any games, but the strip is consistently awesome. I wish they'd fix their stupid RSS feed.
Wonderella is a comic book hero spoof, a little bit Cathy but generally funny.
I don't fully understand the cast of characters from Achewood, perhaps this is okay.
Also, the New Yorker Cartoon Anti-Caption Contest doesn't fully count as a web comic, but it's close. Each week the real drawings from the New Yorker cartoon caption contest are posted, and readers are encouraged to submit aggressively unfunny captions.
At the end of last year, I made my first attempt at the design of dissent. Unfortunately, I didn't have $20 million, and had to substitute 6000+ crystals for the real thing. Along with learning I am a glutton for...
The forthcoming movie adaptation of the toy franchise “Transformers” has somehow climbed to the very tippy-top of my summer movie-going list over recent weeks. I don’t know how it got there, because like many people, the esteem in which I hold the previous work of director Michael Bay can be best described as ‘minimal.” Still, it looks like the most promisingly satisfying of a sorry summer lot, even if the core of its offering is only a momentarily satiation. I’m really excited to see it. Oh, and I’ll go see the apparently not-badly-reviewed “Live Free or Die Hard,” too.
I just wanted to come out and say that. No more secrets, people.
Rebecca Charles, chef-owner of Pearl Oyster Bar in New York City and subject of an incredibly lively discussion on Serious Eats, is mad as hell and she's not going to take it any more. She's suing her most recent imitator, Ed McFarland, her former sous-chef of six years, for purposefully stealing her concept, menu, and look and feel in opening his own restaurant, Ed's Lobster Bar, less than a mile from Pearl.
"I've looked the other way for years," Rebecca said. "I understand that chefs take dishes from the restaurants they worked in when they open their own restaurants. But Ed's Lobster Bar is much more than a knock-off. It's an exact duplicate of Pearl. Thirty-one of the 34 dishes on his menu are simply lifted from Pearl. The stools, the look and feel of the place, everything is exactly the same. It's offensive. Plus he lied to me. He told me and the staff when he quit that he was leaving to open an Italian seafood restaurant. I said great. I even offered to help him. Then, six weeks later, he opens Ed's."
In the restaurant world this suit is groundbreaking stuff. Songwriters are sued for stealing lyrics and melodies, screenwriters and movie studios are often accused of stealing treatments (remember when Art Buchwald sued Eddie Murphy?), but as far as I know this is the first time a chef-restaurateur is suing a former employee and accusing him of stealing everything but the toilet paper.
McFarland refused to comment about the suit, telling the New York Times that he hadn't yet seen the paperwork. In what could only be called a serious expression of chutzpah, he told the Times: "I would say it's a similar restaurant. I would not say it's a copy."
Charles knows that many people in and out of the restaurant business will think that she's nuts for doing this. But even though she knows that this is going to be time- and emotion-consuming, not to mention expensive, Charles thinks the time is right for a chef to take a stand on this long-simmering issue: "I'm not trying to be a saint here, but I do feel that by doing this now I am going to be helping a lot of other chefs in the present and future when this happens to them. But obviously that's not the only reason I'm suing Ed. This guy is making money off my back, money that I don't have. I don't have a lot of restaurants. I only have one. I think Pearl Oyster Bar has made a meaningful contribution to food and restaurants in New York, and I'm going to do what I have to do to protect what I have built."
a user study of a new website (sense.us) that supports asynchronous collaboration across a variety of visualization types. its collaborative features includes view sharing, discussion, graphical annotation & social navigation. results of the study show emergent patterns of social data analysis, including cycles of observation & hypothesis, & the complementary roles of social navigation & data-driven exploration. the study ran in 2 different parts: a pair of controlled lab studies & a 3-week live deployment on the IBM corporate intranet."we believe these results show the value of focusing on the social aspects of visual analysis. our user studies indicate that combining conversation & visual data analysis can help people explore a data set both broadly and deeply. from a design perspective, there seems to be a promising opportunity for exploring new widgets & modes of interaction aimed at enhancing collaboration."
[links: berkeley.edu & berkeley.edu (PDF) & berkeley.edu (movie)|via smartmobs.com]
After months of silence, it looks like Shepard Fairey's recent work on the streets of New York has brought the Splasher out of retirement. Not clear yet if this is related to last week's stinkbomb arrest. Matt Barber writes:
Was down on Wooster today at the candy factory building and snapped this photo, the wheatpaste and paint look pretty fresh to me, Shep just put the same poster up near my house last week so thought it may be new, hit me back if you know if it is new or not.If you spot any fresh Splashings, email the pix to photos (at) gothamist (dot) com! And in unrelated streetart news, Councilman Peter Vallone Jr. is trying to revive his anti-graffiti bill. The last version got thrown out by a federal judge after Mark Ecko challenged it on free-speech grounds. The new bill would "allow people under 21 to possess spray paint and large permanent markers if the materials are carried in a sealed container or a bag closed with a key or a combination lock." It's not clear to us how that solves the free-speech problem, but we'll leave that to the courts to decide. UPDATE: we went by the Candy Factory to examine the crime scene-- it's clear that the Splasher just targeted the Shepard Fairey piece and left the surrounding streetart untouched. This is looking more and more like a battle-to-the-death beef between the Splasher and Shepard Fairey for control of the soul of the New York City streetart scene. The last round went to the Splasher, with 20 out of 23 Obey pieces obliterated-- what will happen this time?
We all love Brain Age (Brain Training in Oz)! And so does Nicole Kidman?! This is the cleanest home I've ever seen a DS played in. And I believe this is the oddest actor choice in Nintendo commercial casting. As...
After last week’s packed session, I’m putting together a second Hackathon for facebook developers in NYC next Monday, July 2nd. Come and work on your apps, ask questions, and get feedback.
Thanks to friends Andrew Parker and Union Square Ventures for hosting this time!
Link: RSVP Here
There's been a (mostly boring) conversation going between some blogs over the past few days regarding the line between editorial and advertising. Largely, this is a case of the same silly-meme-into-faux-fact path that I tried to document yesterday. In this case, it's a little less innocent -- Nick Denton used a Valleywag blog post to take a jab at John Battelle and FM Pub by implying its writers sold out by creating copy for a Microsoft campaign that ran on their sites.
The whole thing is, as I said, mostly boring, except that the idea of the post is what ended up being debated, instead of the fact that this is really a case of a not-that-serious personal rivalry turning into an assault on the credibility of a number of good bloggers. And a number of overrated ones, but that's beside the point.
Again with the disclaimers: I know both Nick and John, and like them both for what they're good at, as well as for what makes them different. And I have good friends in both of their companies. This isn't name-dropping; A big part of my job is making connections to people who do innovative things with blogs and in the blogging industry, and they both fall squarely into that description.
But Nick is being pretty transparently intellectually dishonest here -- throwing bombs at John and FM not because he believes what he's saying, but because he knows it'll get attention. The idea of advertising becoming more blog-like is a good thing. If every ad were written by an actual human, had a permanent link to its location, and let people share or tag it, we'd end up with a radically better advertising culture.
The idea of a media team creating advertising content isn't new -- it's as old as publishing itself. And it continues today. Here's Ziff Davis' Contract Publishing services. In public media, here's PBS' Red Book guidelines for underwriting content. Sure, it makes sense to have different teams be responsible for money and editorial. But in blogging, where the editor is the publisher and you can't split a one-person staff in half, merging these functions isn't just logical, it's inevitable. Perhaps if Nick hadn't been a pioneering blogger himself, I'd have believed he was simply mistaken.
In this case, though, we're fortunate to have some pretty articulate advocates for the idea of conversational marketing. For example, FM Pub's Chas Edwards does a great job of telling the story.
But perhaps the best advocate for this style of conversational marketing is Nick Denton. From three years ago:
For appropriate clients, Gawker Media will...
- conceive a weblog campaign
- provide editorial talent and oversight
- create a co-branded page within one of the Gawker sites
- design and build a standalone blog
- promote the campaign weblog on Gawker sites
- promote the campaign weblog on other weblogs
- syndicate out the campaign blog content to news reader applications
- distill and spotlight weblog buzz on the campaign
Some people will question the use of the weblog format in marketing. There is no straightforward answer. Contract publishing, online or offline, can be done well, or badly. It depends on the subject matter, and the tone. Dr Pepper/Seven Up seemed cynical in its exploitation of the weblog format when it launched ragingcow.com, a site devoted to a new milk drink. However, a smart approach to an appropriate topic can work. Witness, Macromedia's product weblogs, or Jason Kottke's weblog campaign around the release of Adaptation, the movie.
In principle, campaign weblogs allow a marketer to participate in the weblog conversation, rather than observe it as a passive sponsor. Now we'll just have to see whether they work.
Seems reasonable to me. Or at least worth a try.
Perl 6 and Parrot Essentials is now open source. A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, Allison Randal, Dan Sugalski, and Leo Tötsch wrote Perl 6 Essentials , which later became Perl 6 and Parrot Essentials . The universe has changed quite a bit since then. Despite that, the first chapter is still very interesting because it's a slice of history about what people were thinking and why things happened the way they did.Read more of this story at use Perl.
Video of a binary adding machine made out of wood and operated by marbles.
Update: The adding machine was built by Matthias Wandel, woodworker extraordinaire. Here's an explanation of how the machine works. Be sure to check out the other projects listed on his home page and what's new page. (thx, charles) (link)
New publicly released data shows that some NYC subway lines are exceeding maximum capacity, both in terms of the number of riders per car and the number of trains per track. (link)
According to Brandweek, Land Rover's new marketing strategy is to show the car as a hero by rushing cars to the sites of natural disasters:When a natural disaster strikes, [Director Scott Duncan] and his crew go on location to capture footage. For example, when floods hit Levasy, Mo., last month, Duncan's crew swooped in like a SWAT team to film the LR3 in action. Turpin said the first spot, breaking next week, would show the LR3 using its hydraulic lift and sealed undercarriage to navigate flooded streets strewn with disabled cars. ... To ensure that the brand isn't seen as...
At a bar filled with arcade games, all of which pre-date the 1990's, hundreds of spectators and competitors gathered yesterday for Wiimbledon. While interest in the first-ever Nintendo Wii tennis tournament was high, only 128 competitors were able to play in the single-elimination tournament at Barcade. Players dressed up as tennis players, Harry Potter, and came in their best bear costumes (the bear was eliminated and dejected). While the competition was intense at times, it was obvious to us that several players were in over their heads. Before each match, players determined who would serve with an intense showdown of rock, scissor, paper. The winners often decided that choosing to return was the way to go - mistakes on your service game are easily exploitable at this high level. The final match was between Russ Yagoda (Luigi from the Wii-Tang Clan) and Albert Thrower (team Geekanerd) and fittingly played on artificial grass. It was a tight match, but with Thrower serving first, Yagoda had the clear advantage, proving to be crucial as he eventually won the match. The best costume went to Adam Duerson for the bear costume. And somehow the shortest shorts winner had relatively long shorts. Frankly, Gothamist expected to see some moose knuckle or camel toe in that category. Ramiro Garcia, who was easily the most expressive player yesterday (he inexplicably jump served and swung his "racket" with a full motion), won an award for being the most likely to cause injury. Geekanerd had a video camera there (one of several) and already has video up from the day. And check out Gothamist's interview with Lane Buschel and Steve Bryant, the two organizers behind Wiimbledon. More photos and a slideshow after the jump.
Oh no! Could it be? Is the rematch between Takeru 'Tsunami' Kobayashi and Joey Chestnut in doubt? Last year at the Nathan's annual 4th of July Hot Eating Contest, Kobayashi narrowly defeated Chestnut to win the Mustard Belt for the sixth year in a row. Defending his title next week may not be possible for Kobayashi. First, his mother passed away in March, causing the Tsunami to take a sabbatical from training. Now, news comes from Kobayashi's blog (bad translation) that he's got a bout of jaw arthritis! Apparently Kobayashi can only open his mouth big enough to fit a finger and the injury happened just a week into training. If his accounts are true, Kobayashi certainly won't be able to scarf down a record number of hot dogs or beat Chestnut. Kobayashi says that, despite the injury, he still wants to return to New York to defend his title, "I want to be the pride of my mother." If you have any doubts that these eaters were real athletes, there you go. They get injured while training, and they want to honor their deceased relatives. In a qualifier for this year's Nathan's event, Chestnut ate a whopping 59 1/2 hot dogs with buns, shattering Kobayashi's record of 53 3/4 from last July 4th. If Kobayashi is still injured when July 4th rolls around, you can be sure that Chestnut will bring the Mustard Belt back to the United States. One has to wonder though - is a victory over the Michael Jordan of competitive eating the same when he's not in top form? Of course, this could just be an elaborate ruse to trick us into thinking that the Tsunami is out of contention. Photograph of Joey Chestnut and Takeru Kobayashi from last year's Nathan's Hot Dog Eating Contest by Seth Wenig/AP
A lesson in quotas and school bureaucracy for an 11-year-old: The Post reoprts that Nikita Rau was denied a place at a magnet school because she's not white. Rau and her parents hoped she would attend Mark Twain School - IS 239, a magnet school in Coney Island (recently reported to have the best Math and English scores for Level 4 students) but a 33-year-old federal ruling is preventing her entry. The quotas for the school, set in 1974 for desegregation, are 40% minority and 60% white (IS 227 in Queens is the only other NYC public school that also operates under the order). From the Post:
When Nikita recently applied to Mark Twain, she took an admission test geared toward music students and scored a 79. In May, the Education Department sent her parents a letter that said Nikita was not accepted - even though white students who scored lower on the same test were admitted. Officials told the Raus that because Nikita is classified as a minority, she would need to score at least 84.4 to be accepted, while white students needed to score 77 or more.Nikita's father Dr. Anjan Rau railed, "This country believes in racial equality, and we should not face this in America. I think it's morally wrong! She's American born, and she's a U.S. citizen, and [her parents] are both U.S. citizens, but that doesn't count." And he added, "It could hurt her chances of going to Harvard, Yale or Princeton." The Department of Education said, "Although we strive to make our enrollment process as equitable as possible, we must comply with the federal court order." The Raus' lawyer wrote a letter to the DOE, "The unconstitutional rejection of my client constitutes discrimination." The Post reports that after they started to inquire about the issue, the DOE offered Nikita a place at "IS 98, the Bay Academy, another Coney Island school for the gifted, albeit one less competitive than Mark Twain." We wonder what Twain would have made of this.
The San Francisco Chronicle's Sunday Magazine cover piece on women chefs is available online, as is a video round-table discussion with chefs Traci Des Jardins (Jardiniere), Nancy Oakes (Boulevard), and Loretta Keller (CoCo 500), as well as authors Ann Cooper ("A Women's Place is in the Kitchen") and Joyce Goldstein ("The Mediterranean Kitchen").
If you're a fan of ruminating over the differences between men and women in the kitchen, you'll definitely find something here to chew on.
What is with Justin Timberlake these days?The pop star, who used to used have a squeaky clean Mickey Mouse Club image, has been throwing his bad attitude all around lately.
Justin hanging with his girl, Jessica Biel --- who obviously didn't read the article where Justin said he didn't want her joining him on tour --- in Stockholm on Sunday, when he got all snarky with some of his Swedish fans. Mr. SexyBack was reportedly rude to his devoted followers, after they asked him for autographs and photos.
"You want me to juggle also?" he supposedly snapped at one eager beaver.
This boy's ego has gotten way out of hand. Justin is in major need of a reality check or else his head is going to explode. And then he won't even be pretty anymore.
I attended my favorite wedding of all time last Saturday. (Yes, it was even nicer than my own 38 years ago at the Cliff House at-the-beach in San Francisco on a cloudless, un-SF-type day. That ancient ceremony overlooked seal rocks when there were still seals cavorting everywhere. )
This recent one was at the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens, and the love was as thick as the air was fragrant.
The gist: A lighthearted unscientific poll that was created as a PR ploy for a tech company is quickly evolving into a "real" news story, being treated as fact by mainstream press. That evolution from marketing effort to established fact can have real impact on people who works in related fields. This phenomenon is worth examining because, while this fairly harmless example hasn't resulted in a lot of drama, it shows the pattern that underlies a lot of the drama that tends to pop up in web communities.
First, to begin with the disclaimers, I know a lot of the people involved in this story, either as acquaintances in the tech industry, or socially by running into them at various events. Second, I don't think anybody's done anything egregiously wrong here, I just think the end result is interesting, insightful and a little scary.
Here's the story: Last week, I got an unsolicited press release and pitch from a PR company that has sent me announcements for a few years. I get a lot of these pitches, though I never blog about them, and this particular PR company is fairly respectful so I don't mind much. (I'll omit mention of the PR company, though they're fairly easy to find if you're interested.)
Towards the beginning of the announcement was the following:
"Folksonomy" has been voted the word most likely to make web-users "wince, shudder or want to bang your head on the key-board" -- in a poll to mark the tenth birthday of the word "weblog" by finding the single most irksome new word to have been spawned by the Internet.
Folksonomy (a web classification system) out-pointed words including "blog" (an online journal), "blogosphere" (the collective name for all blogs), "netiquette" (Internet etiquette) and "webinar" (a web seminar) -- in a poll commissioned by the Lulu Blooker Prize (www.lulublookerprize.com), the world's first literary prize for "blooks", alias books based on blogs.
A folksonomy -- a hybrid of "folks" and "taxonomy" -- is a system for classifying web content by tagging key words.
The press release was a fairly straightforward pitch for Lulu, one of the more popular services for printing books on demand. They were pretty clearly trying to get the word "blook" to be named one of the most annoying web words, as an oblique promo for their sponsorship of the "Blooker" prize. ("Blooker", of course, is itself a take on the Booker Prize.)
The poll mentioned in the pitch was run by YouGov in the U.K., though I could find no mention of their methodology. As has been noted by prominent bloggers like Jason Kottke, the press release and poll were picked up by some mainstream news organizations, first starting with second-tier small-town papers and moving up to established outlets like Entrepreneur, Salon, and the Seattle Times, as you can see in a Google News search.
Now, when I got the email, the first person I thought of was Thomas Vander Wal, who's a friend of mine and whom I'd just been hanging out with at a conference earlier last week. Thomas coined the word "folksonomy" (see his history of the word's origin) and has some part of his professional identity associated with the word.
Fortunately, Thomas' career is far too well-established to really be negatively affected by someone saying a word he created is annoying. In fact, I'm sure Thomas has considered "folksonomy" to be somewhat annoying from time to time himself. But instead of coining a phrase, he could easily have made a product or service that was being maligned in passing as part of a company's promotional efforts. And that potential is what makes this story interesting. I emailed Thomas late last week to get his opinions on the press release and its migration to mainstream media outlets.
I have seen a few variations of this and yet to see any actual source, until you pointed this press release. I was amazed that 2,000 people in Britain knew of the word and knew it well enough to hate it, but the poll being British has only been in 2/3rds of the "news" articles I read. I was not surprised with the term folksonomy being hated as most people read the continually bad overview of the term on Wikipedia (after pushing from academics I finally posted the concise definition and story about the creation of the term - http://vanderwal.net/folksonomy.html - as they were tired of being corrected that their understanding of folksonomy was wrong).
The remarkable thing here is, I don't think YouGov would present their poll as anything other than simple entertainment -- they don't pretend to be scientifically valid. Even those who published the poll would probably not assert that the trumpeted headline represents actual facts. But through sheer force of repetition, and gradual amplification from a PR pitch to a few blog posts and second-tier media outlets, all the way up to reputable media outlets, this little nugget of information has already graduated to a semblance of truthiness. Those of us who have the misfortune to spend too much time at web technology industry events will undoubtedly be hearing someone say "this is the most annoying word on the web" in reference to a PowerPoint slide about folksonomy at some point in the near future. Like the false stories that Al Gore claimed to have invented the Internet, uncritical repetition by media outlets and the idea's convenience as a shorthand punchline will work together to subvert fact.
In this case, the result's kinda harmless. One guy's pet word is kinda tarnished, and I'm sure when Thomas's upcoming book is released, half of the people he talks in promoting it will ask him stupid questions about whether the word is annoying. That's not so bad. Lulu might have gotten a little bit of press out of this, but most of the mentions only plug the poll results and mention the company in passing, which isn't exactly a slam-dunk.
The most damning thing here is the fact that these media outlets, many of which do have blogs already and have embraced social media, are still in the habit of repeating poorly-sourced unscientific polls as if they accurately reflect societal trends. And often, the end result isn't merely a harmless annoyance for one person, it's the perpetuation of a falsehood that can affect the careers or efforts of people or entire organizations. It's the kind of thing that can make you "wince, shudder or want to bang your head on the key-board".
The greatest legacy of the iPhone may be the ways in which it changes the mobile phone and media industries. Big changes could happen over the long term.
The world's top ranked competitive eater, Takeru Kobayashi, has run into a little occupational hazard. Surprisingly, his stomach didn't explode from being over-stuffed; unsurprisingly, he developed jaw arthritis a week after he started training rigorously for the July 4th Nathan's Famous Hot Dog Eating contest, which he has won six years in a row. Despite the injury, he would still like to participate in the contest and "be the pride of my mother," who sadly died earlier this year. If you know Japanese you can read more of this thoughts on his blog. We hope he gets better soon!
This is a stripped-down implementation of the server side of the Atom Publishing Protocol as an Apache module, implemented in C. It felt like something that needed to exist and I am better-qualified for this particular chore than your average geek; having said that, I have no idea if anyone actually needs such a thing. mod_atom activity can be tracked on this blog, for now, here. If any interest develops, then I’ll transfer discussion to a blog at
mod-atom.netwhich will be driven, of course, by mod_atom.For the moment, I’m going to brain-dump everything about the project right here, if only as a crutch for my own memory. People who care about the Atom protocol, and those who care about Apache internals wrangling, might find it interesting; the intersection of those two groups is, I suspect, me.
What’s an Apache Module?
It’s code that gets linked into httpd, the Web server binary. There are hundreds; a few are included with the server distro, but most aren’t. Code in a module doesn’t have to do anything like CGI, you’re just a C subroutine that gets called with a package of details about the request and the current server state. Which can save some cycles. Might those cycles be significant in your application? Maybe, sometimes. If mod_atom is fast, it’s more apt to be fast because of its low-rent flat-file-only approach. On the other hand, being in the server means that you have to code in C and you have to be really careful about concurrency and memory management and all sorts of low-level grunge.
By the way, to be technically correct, whenever I say Apache I should probably be saying “httpd”, since while they used to be synonyms, Apache means much more now, the httpd Web Server is just one piece. But httpd is an ugly little splodge of letters, Apache sounds so much better. And on modern Debian-family systems, httpd is called “apache” anyhow.
Why Me?
Well, I understand the Atom Protocol pretty well and I’ve already written a couple of Apache modules (for a failed startup), so it’s less work for me than it would be for nearly anyone else.
Also, I think that the protocol is going to be a big enough part of the Web ecosystem that Apache, as perhaps the world’s single most important piece of Web infrastructure, really ought to support it. Think of it as giving PUT something useful to do.
What Does it Do?
Implements all of the Atom Protocol, near as I can tell.
There’s no database. Everything is persisted in files. Entry paths look like
/blogs/tim/atom/e/entries/2007/06/23/cat-pixSince it blasts Atom Entries straight into files, it can easily (unlike most Atom protocol implementations) preserve foreign markup.
It should run fine under any MPM, without concurrency issues.
All the
atom:idvalues beginurn:uuid, so you could in principle move a whole publication from one server and directory to another. Those who have memories of me arguing bitterly against URNs in general andatom:idin particular can please restrain your snickering while I’m around.Configuration
There isn’t much. In your Apache config file, you can define as many “publications” as you want. Each requires one directive, for example:
AtomPub /blogs/joe /z0/pubs/blogs/jb "Joe's Blog" "J. Blow"The first argument is a prefix; any URI beginning with it is considered to be part of the publication. The second is the filesystem directory where the data is rooted. The filenames are the same as the URIs, only with the directory substituted for the prefix. The title and author are self-explanatory. There are no defaults.
When Apache starts up, if there’s an AtomPub directive but the directory structure isn’t there, the init code creates it.
mod_atom doesn’t do any other configuration of any kind, for the moment. Yes, I know there are lots of other kinds of configurations you might like to be able to do. People talk about hitting an 80/20 point; this more like a 60/1 point. Publications have collections, and per RFC4287, the minimum you need is a title and an author; so you really couldn’t do this with any less. And with one line in a config file you get a fully-functional publication.
One thing you can’t configure at all is the directory layout where the data goes. That’s hard-wired way deep into the code.
Right now, a publication comes with two hard-wired collection named “Entries” and “Media”. The code can actually (in theory) handle multiple Entry and Media collections, but I haven’t figured out a cheap enough way to configure them.
After all, haven’t people been saying “Complexion over Commiseration” or something like that recently?
How Much Work Was It To Implement the Atom Protocol?
Not much, actually, for a competent C programmer who understands the protocol and some of Apache. My Apache-module experience was less valuable than I’d expected, because I had written Apache 1.* modules and the 2.* API is quite a bit different.
Anyhow, I started on April 26th and I have enough today to start showing the world. I program fast but I’ve been busy, so it’s a very part-time thing. There are 8400 lines of code, but that includes a 2600 lines of of Genx (because Apache doesn’t have much of an XML generator) and then 2700 or so of unit-test code (1700 or so being Genx’s). So it’s really no big deal.
Life was immensely easier because of having the Ape available. Being an Apache module imposes some constraints that make unit testing tricky. While the Ape provides functional rather than unit testing, strictly speaking, using it shook out loads of bugs and saved a huge amount of time. The setup was amusingly arcane; The Ape’s Ruby code running under JRuby in a servlet in a Java EE app server talking to my naked hacked Apache server, 8080 to 4444 I think. What with some other things that are there to support ongoing, my little laptop is running more than its share of Web servers.
Rocket Science?
There’s really not much. You suck in XML and bit-bags from the net, you find a place to put ’em, you build feeds describing them, you echo them back on request, you’re careful about concurrency. It’s vanilla infrastructure engineering.
There’s one premature optimization; I worried about someone setting up a few thousand publications on one server (wouldn’t be surprising) and since the way a module works is you have to look at every URI that comes in to see if it’s one of yours, the task of scanning through your list of known pubs for prefix matches could be pretty costly. So, the mod_atom setup code compiles the list of known pubs into a simple little finite automaton which can tell you which if any of your pubs a URI belongs to really fast. Which is pretty silly, YAGNI territory probably. But I’m a sucker for finite automata.
I tried to avoid mutexing; the only place where you really have to (I think) is when a PUT comes in and you need to lock things down while you check the ETag and, if you accept the PUT, blast it in. I think you should be able to get enough concurrency out of the filesystem for the rest of the protocol. Based on what I hear, if someone took a mod_atom install and started firing PUTs at a few existing URIs from a lot of parallel sources, I bet the
apr_global_mutex...calls would start to hurt pretty quick. I have lots more premature-optimization ideas for that situation.Frankly, the hardest bit was figuring out all the autoconf and libtool voodoo to compile the sucker, and in the end I couldn’t; in the finest open-source tradition I reused code from Josh Rotenberg and did cut/paste/hack till it worked.
I’m assuming that one of these days someone I respect will explain to me why libtool & friends are a good idea and how to use them properly; until then I’m going to ignore them and hope they’re replaced. This technique allowed me to avoid ever learning either imake or C++.
Legal Status
Apache V2 license, copyright Sun Microsystems, if the ASF ever got interested I have the go-ahead to sign over whatever to whomever. Haven’t figured out where to host yet, but here’s a tarball. If you want to actually try to run it, do please contact me.
Technical Status
It’s not really ready to use, but I’m publishing it because I want to start talking and get some advice and opinions on what I should do about some things, and that’s easier if you can point at source code.
mod_atom passes a few (eighty-odd) unit tests, plus it gets a clean bill of health from the Ape. One of my short-term to-dos is to run Joe Gregorio’s test client against it. I’m pretty sure the basic technical approach to wrangling entries and feeds is sensible and can probably be made to run very efficiently.
It has one big and one small missing piece, and a major enhancement I think would be good. The big missing piece is HTML (see next section). The small missing piece is collection paging; it just isn’t there at the moment; you get the last 20 entries in reverse
app:editedorder and that’s all you get. No biggie.The big enhancement I want to do is non-destructive editing. Right now it implements PUT by replacing the old data with the new, and DELETE by, well, deleting the data. I think it would be better, in all cases, to copy the data aside, uh, somewhere. But I want to talk to people about this one too, because I suspect it may involve weird corners.
To HTML or not to HTML?
For the moment, mod_atom is just an Atom server, not a blog engine. Which is to say that it accepts and stores and updates and deletes the Atom Entries and generates feeds appropriately, but doesn’t actually generate any HTML versions.
I’m not sure what to do about this. It’d be pretty easy to just pull the data out of the Atom Entries, wrap some basic HTML around it, and have a blogging engine. But I think it’s irresponsible to publish HTML from outside without sanitizing it. While I’m betting that it’s appropriate to do the low-level persistence and CRUD in the bowels of httpd, I’m having trouble believing that HTML sanitation and beautification belong in there too. There are tools like TagSoup and Hpricot which are just the thing for the job.
So maybe there is an ancillary “blogging system” that does the necessary with the Atom entries? Or maybe there’s a TagSoup equivalent available for C that could help out?
To-Do
Suggestions welcome.
Try it out on a few other systems, right now I’ve only tested OS X. I expect breakage in my hacked-up build system, but not much in the actual code. Programs written in C are portable, everyone knows that.
Shake it down with Joe Gregorio’s APP Test Client.
Add a bunch more tests to the Ape for bits of the protocol which, now having implemented them, I realize are tricky. In particular, the Ape never tested sending a PUT to a media resource, so that portion of the mod_atom code is unexercised and likely buggy.
Add collection paging.
See if anyone at ASF might be interested, now or down the road.
Fix up error handling so that client errors get an explanation in the response body, not just an HTTP error code. Apache doesn’t make this as straightforward as you might expect.
Simultaneously, refactor error-handling internally. Some of my routines return
apr_status_tand otherschar *; it’s kind of ad-hoc and not very well thought through.Figure out how to do some load testing.
Do some evangelism. My eyes have that a Ruby gleam these days, and grinding out all this C has been kind of painful so it would be nice if it turned out to be useful for somebody.
Jason and I popped into Momofuku Ssäm Bar last night for an early dinner. We hadn't been in a few weeks, and it turns out during our time away, the menu's been updated with lots of new items and some old stand-byes received new treatment. My favorite sea scallops are now served with the crunchy seaweed that usually accompanies the cured hamachi, and are layered over a lemon puree and accompanied by pickled cherries. We had local sugar snap peas sprinkled with ham bits and softened onions, floating in a ham broth. Jason pointed out it was a nice play on the flavors of split pea soup, delicious!
On the meat side of the menu, we tried roasted lamb belly from Four Story Hill Farm, PA on a bed of wilted swiss chard. When our server placed it in front of us, I had a whiff of doughnuts. Doughnuts? Closer sniffing revealed it to be a cinnamony smell, maybe the lamb had a bit of cinnamon rub? Regardless, it was moist and sweet, with a thick layer of fat. No one does belly and fat like the Chang crew! We also ordered a Chicken Ballontine, which was beautifully executed and each bite revealed the essence of chicken. It was nice to see such a traditional preparation on the menu, and so well done.
Our final new menu item was the Crispy Pig's Head, also from Four Story Hill Farm. Oh my! If it weren't for a staff recommendation from our man Cory, I would have been too scared to try this, but it was amazing. Deep fried, it arrived looking like a fish stick, only larger. But a single bite revealed a creamy, gelatinous interior melting with tender pork meat and, you guessed it, more fat! The accompanying spicy mustard sauce and lettuce cleansed just the right amount of grease from the tongue, leaving me sighing with delight after each bite.
For dessert we had strawberry shortcake with local berries and fresh whipped cream. The shortcakes were perfect: crumbly without being dry, and had a nice sweetness to them. The strawberries were left whole, and weren't doused in sugar like in many places, so the sweet of the dessert actually came more from the shortcake, and the berries and cream countered it a bit. This morning I was thinking about stopping in again tonight, just for dessert!
I love Ssäm Bar, but with any place you frequent, you can sometimes tire of even the best food. It was so exciting to see all the new stuff on the menu and realize it's better than ever over there. Now the only question is when will my arteries be able stand a return trip!
comments are open
If you hold a New York farmer close to your heart, nominate them in the I Love My NY Farmer contest! You have until November 30 to nominate a farmer, whether they produce milk, harvest vegetables, cultivate honey, or grow flowers. Read the submission guidelines at NY Farms! and help give recognition to those who produce our food.
According to the New York Times, "Ron Kind, a Democrat from Wisconsin and a former quarterback of the Harvard football team, wants to overhaul farm subsidy policy and pump more money into conservation, renewable energy projects, and rural development."
Kind's bill would significantly cut the large agribusiness subsidies that, according to critics, "encourage overproduction and consequently artificially lower prices and benefit only a small percentage of farmers, primarily large growers of corn, cotton, soybeans, rice and wheat."
What's interesting is that Kind represents a district rich with big dairy farmers who traditionally have done quite well in the government subsidy department. Kind says that "his farmers realized that change was inevitable and would welcome more money and programs for beginning farmers."
If Kind's dairy farmer constituency favors the bill, it strikes me that it's probably a sensible, forward-thinking piece of legislation I could get behind. Anyone who can further enlighten us should weigh in on this traditionally arcane but important topic. Following are the key passages of the Times editorial supporting Kind's efforts.
For years, reform-minded legislators have been trying to rid the country of a farm subsidy program that lavishes huge amounts of money on relatively few producers, compromises the environment, penalizes third-world farmers and fouls up trade negotiations. With the farm bill set to expire this year, the Bush administration has already proposed several excellent reforms. Now legislators in both houses are offering another approach that actually improves on the administration's.
The architects are respected farm-state legislators, led by the Senate's Richard Lugar, an Indiana Republican, and the House's Ron Kind, a Wisconsin Democrat. Their matching bills threaten entrenched interests, and that is exactly why they deserve a close look and wide support.
At the heart of their approach is an overhaul of agricultural subsidies. Four major subsidy programs -- crafted to reward big growers of traditional crops like corn, wheat and soybeans -- would be phased out and replaced by a single ''risk-management account'' whose main purpose would be to cushion farmers from annual price swings. Crop insurance would still be available for major disasters.
The estimated savings -- $55 billion over 10 years -- would be used to expand rural conservation programs, encourage the production of renewable biofuels, provide more money for food stamps and help smaller farmers of specialty crops who are now frozen out of the system."
Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obamabegan offering free ringtonesand wallpapers last week.
"The ringtones feature a techno beat along with lyrics like “Go, Obama, Obama!” or clips of speeches the Illinois senator has made on universal health care. They were formatted and delivered by Boston-based mobile technology boutique MStyle. The Boston Herald reports.
“It’s a way for Sen. Obama to reach out to a different audience,” said Nick Bogovich, director of technology for MStyle, a seven-person company based in Downtown Crossing.
Some of Obama’s ringtones seem downright wacky. One titled “Letter to Obama” simply goes, Go! Go! Go! Obama, Obama, oh!”
Other ringtones feature snippets of speeches on topics like the Iraq War and health care. "
You can listen to them here.
Previously: - Free Obama ringtones to highlight candidate’s position on issues
Location-based microblogging in the 30s: this “robotic” messenger display aims at “TO AID persons who wish to make or cancel appointments or inform friends of their whereabout“:
Why do I blog this? definitely not twitter but somewhat related to the same practice of sharing micro-content. It did not seem to take off though.
i'm taking an off loom fibers class at fleisher. it's a great place to take classes (here in philly). during the first class, i was given a bag of green handmade paper and some spanish moss to "make something...
Let's paraphrase what we wrote yesterday: How is it again, with Deputy Mayor Dan Doctoroff and Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan riding their bikes, that NYC remains a bike-unfriendly city? Yesterday, two bicyclists died in separate incidents in Brooklyn and the Bronx. At 9AM, 18-year-old Luis Ramos was biking to his job at George's Spanish and American Restaurant when a woman opened her car door in his path on Flushing Avenue near Beaver Street. The Post describes that "Ramos slammed into the door, flew over his handlebars and fell into traffic, where a school bus ran over him." Ramos' brother Lucas had been biking about two blocks behind him and saw the police at the scene. He said, "I ran over to him to hug him. But the cops told me not to touch him." Ramos was pronounced dead at Woodhull Hospital and the police did not issue any summons. And in the Bronx yesterday afternoon, 30-year-old Juan Solis was killed while riding his bike on East Gun Hill Road. The NY Times reports that Solis was "trying to ride around a car that was double-parked when a white box-type truck, going east, hit him at high speed and fled the scene." Solis was pronounced dead at Jacobi Medical Center and the police are trying to determine the truck's license plate number. Transportation Alternatives has a flyer that explains how drivers and bicyclists both can give respect and get respect from each other (PDF).
Man, I am behind in my movie seeing. This is on the list.
The next iteration of OS X is on track for release in late October, and we have some supposed clues as to the roadmap here on out.
My friends, David and Adriana, asked me to officiate their wedding. A bit later I will probably have some deep thoughts on it. For now, I am sort of amazed by how short the ceremony was. As soon as it began, it was over. My friend keeps saying that this whole thing could be a romantic comedy starring Jennifer Aniston. The plot is a single girl who has lost her faith in love become an officiant for weddings and finds love. Who knows?
Their wedding was so beautiful and I was so honored to be a part of it in such an important way.
For those who are curious -- and many people are -- it is easy to get officiated. You simply do it online. I used openordination.org. Then I went down to City Hall and got a certificate. Simple.
Years ago I decided that I wanted to have a real blog after doing some "offline blogging" with .mac and an application whos name I have forgotten. Back in the internet eons there was only ONE viable platform to do...
Since at least the '60s philosopher Walter Benjamin's essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" has been a favorite for conceptualist artists working with imagery to cite in support of their work whether it actually supports it or not. Benjamin's style is murky and delphic compared to say, Clement Greenberg's, making it easier for people to pick and choose suitable phrases from it, even though much of "WAAMR"'s content was aimed at a very specific set of political circumstances (the rise of fascism in the '30s--the print era) that would seem to make it inapplicable to someone making present day art. To the extent it is used as the basis for a discussion of multiples vs originals in the art market it is a blueprint for boredom, and not good boredom. (I hate all that kind of talk because it's mostly about money--the context here was Creative Commons licenses and how much freedom they give the artist to also sell work, I think--yawn.)
Case in point to all of the above: This discussion over at Paddy Johnson's blog between artist Nathaniel Stern and commenter David McBride. McBride attempts to correct Stern's reading of the Benjamin essay and then they spend several paragraphs wrangling over what the essay means, both back in the day and now. It doesn't help that the two aren't speaking the same language: Stern uses "meme" as a gerund ("meme'd") and McBride thinks he means "copied"; Stern thinks "aura" as Benjamin uses it is a form of "value" (it was really more like "residue of religious power"). Then there's the question of whether "to exploit" is good or bad. These appear to be generational misunderstandings. In any case the back and forth is interesting, if only to convince you to stay out of Benjamin country and stick to something informative and fun like "Avant Garde & Kitsch."
