randomwalks/dj

Originally posted by Drew from Dembot, on August 18, 2007 10:37 PM

Proof of the wonder of the GNU has struck pizza party. Check "Pizza Py Party", an improved version of Pizza Party programmed in Pyton (by Travis Nickles).

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Cory's Web LOG, on August 18, 2007 8:59 PM

I am seeing Harold and Kumar 2 the moment it comes out. I have been waiting for more funny, un p.c. fun. This movie gets so much right about race in a way that silly movies like these never have the courage to even try. Oh, and if you have not seen Harold and Kumar Go To White Castle, rent it now! It is hysterical.

Originally posted by Angela Tucker from tuckergurl, on August 18, 2007 4:35 PM

Best story I’ve read in a long time. Jackpot, indeed.

 ★ 

Originally posted by John Gruber from Daring Fireball, on August 18, 2007 3:50 PM

I love Kweli's explanation of the phenomenon. I wish people gave answers like this more often, cuz most journalists never grasp that rappers are musicians who make choices for musical reasons. Also note: Talib Kweli doesn't vote. Scandal! Barack Obama...

Originally posted by jsmooth995 from hiphopmusic.com:, on August 18, 2007 1:26 PM

August 18 and 19, 2007, Saturday & Sunday at 1:30 pm. "On The Town"

The classic musical "On The Town," shot on location in New York City, was one of the first films to depict the New York City subway in living color. Gene Kelly stars alongside Frank Sinatra as a love struck sailor on leave in the Big Apple who falls head over heels for "Miss Turnstiles," a "typical rider" whose picture appears in many different poses on advertising placards. Among the songs: "New York, New York" and "Come Up To My Place." Also stars Jules Munshin, Ann Miller, Vera-Ellen and Betty Garrett.

August, Saturdays & Sundays, 3:00 pm. "American Experience: Transcontinental Railroad"
Go behind-the-scenes of one of the greatest engineering feats of the 19th century--the transcontinental railroad. Meet the engineers, entrepreneurs, and legions of workers who made it possible.

Saturday, September 8, 2007, 10:00 am to 4:00 pm, “IND Anniversary September Special: A Day on the A.” Only 400 seats available -- get your tickets now while there is space available!

Highlighting the 75th Anniversary of the opening of the first section of the IND, vintage R 1/9 trains will travel from mid-town to the Transit Museum’s very own Court Street station. After a brief layover we’ll re-board and head out to
enjoy the sun and surf at Rockaway Park. Then, we'll go the distance along the remainder of the longest route in the system, closing the day boroughs away at 207th Street in the Bronx.

This a a one-of-a kind opportunity to experience subway travel onboard the vintage rail fleet, usually on static display in the Transit Museum. Not to be missed are the bouncy wicker seating of yesteryear, sharing your experiences with fellow passengers, the Nostalgia Train ‘wave’ to bemused people on subway platforms as the vintage trains rolls by and the mid-trip destination activities. Nostalgia Train tickets are $30, Museum members $25, children 3-17 $10. For reservations please call 718-694-1867.

New York Transit Museum. Complete calendar of events. Corner of Boerum Place and Schermerhorn Street, Brooklyn Heights, T-F 10 am to 4 pm, Sat and Sun 12 Noon to 5 pm, closed Mondays and major holidays, 718-694-1600 ($ admission fee).

New York Transit Museum Gallery Annex & Store at Grand Central Terminal, located just off the main concourse in the Shuttle Passage, adjacent to the Station Masters' Office, M-F 8 am to 8 pm, Sat and Sun 10 am to 6 pm, closed major holidays and for special events, 212-878-0106 (free).

Originally posted by Chug from A Guy In New York, on August 18, 2007 9:07 AM

All the time people ask me about good docs to see so every once in a while I will post a suggestion. Here's my first one.

Recently I borrowed a copy of My Architect and absolutely loved it! I am not a big fan of personal documentaries. They can be a bit whiny especially if the doc is about understanding a relationship with an estranged parent. This movie though is completely fascinating and moving. The film is about the son of Louis Kahn, a famous arcitect who had several families and designed a few buildings on the side. I know nothing about architecture and this film really go me thinking about what I find beautiful and why. Plus, there was this great message within the film about accepting your family, your parents as they are (were) that I especially related to. I highly recommend it.

Originally posted by Angela Tucker from tuckergurl, on August 18, 2007 6:43 AM

Bernard Yomtov, in the comments on Brad DeLong’s journal:

A reporter should not be assigned to cover subject X unless he has as good an understanding of X as a baseball writer is expected to have of baseball.

 ★ 

Originally posted by John Gruber from Daring Fireball, on August 17, 2007 8:15 PM

Greetings,

As annoyed as I get with blogs that devolve into the meta (look at my redesign! I just changed blog hosts!), I must consume the humble pie and say I’m moving the Borkware Miniblog to WordPress, mainly so I can use the most excellent Red Planet Mars Edit editor. Web forms just don’t do it for me any more. Hopefully just setting up a redirect from my previous blog location to this one will work correctly for both of my subscribers.

Originally posted by Mark Dalrymple from Borkware Miniblog, on August 17, 2007 3:41 PM

Brad Fitzpatrick and David Recordon on the social graph problem:

A centralized "owner" of the social graph is bad for the Internet. I'm not saying anybody should ban Facebook, though! Far from it. It's a great product, and I love it, but the graph needs to exist outside of Facebook. MySpace also has a lot of good data, but not all of it. Likewise LiveJournal, Digg, Twitter, Zooomr, Pownce, Friendster, Plaxo, the list goes on. More important is that any one of these sites shouldn't own it; nobody/everybody should. It should just exist.

Originally posted by Michael Sippey from (un)filtered, on August 17, 2007 3:06 PM

I try to keep my social network as open as possible. Here's the thing -- I'm not talking about web applications that mimic real-world behaviors. I mean the real world. The people I befriend, collaborate with, and share ideas with are not constrained by the companies that they belong to, or the tools they choose to use. That's how I like it.

Case in point? From the outside, it seems like peple come and people go and sometimes, people come back to working at companies. In my experience, it ends up being that those with good ideas end up putting their heads together, regardless of where their butts are sitting.

I was reminded of that recently by reading about the end of Jason Shellen's time at Google. I like this guy Jason -- he's smart and funny, two traits that go a long way. And when he and I both started working with the founders of blogging companies to try and help out on the business side of things, we were the only two people in the world doing that kind of work. It's been five years or so since then, and we've bumped into each other at countless conferences and events and even at each other's offices over the years. One time we went down to crash one of his birthday parties with his family and all their kids. (It's well worth it -- these kids know how to make some heart-wrenchingly sweet signs.)

But if you didn't know us, it probably looked like we've been competitors all these years. Someone who didn't know us would say "man, those guys must hate each other". Being on the inside, you realize that you'd be an idiot to hate the only other person who really understands what you do.

All of this is a long-winded way of saying, I don't care if your paychecks are cut by Larry and Sergey or Ben and Mena or Manny, Moe and Jack if you've got something to contribute. Especially if you've got a vision. And I can't think of a better vision to laud than Brad's Thoughts on the Social Graph. It is, appropriately, a plan for opening up social networks; It's not so much a collection of thoughts as it is a manifesto. And two of the most creative, innovative friends I know are both working on it. Brad Fitzpatrick is, of course, not merely a hacker or a creator, but truly an inventor. As long as we all have open access to the things he builds, I'm an admirer and a fan for life. And David Recordon (congrats on that Open Source Award! You didn't even have to write any code!) has already proven he knows how to build momentum on the sort of efforts that would be unimaginably ambitious to so many others.

Now I just hope everybody else who hacks on these things has the same desire to have an open social network, and realizes how intrinsically valuable such a thing can be. And I hope that those who are newer to social media familiarize themselves with the history of social media, where people acted like supportive contributors, collaborators, and even friends. Fingers crossed.

Originally posted by Anil from Anil Dash, on August 17, 2007 1:33 PM

I've decided it is time to get a new arch-nemesis. Sure, I have an old one, but, honestly, he's not really doing the job -- I picked him up in the heady '90s, and while initially he was very active, recently he's pretty much dropped out of site. Frankly, this just makes me look bad.

I called up the The Guild of Calamitous Intent ("the recognized leader in organized havoc") and asked to be assigned a new nemesis, and after going through like a billion phone options ("...press 3 if you have forgotten the name of your nemesis...") I got to talk to some evil dude for like two hours before I could convince him that even though I technically had a nemesis he had gone inactive and I wanted a new one.

There are a bunch of boring forms, then you wait a while, and then, finally, you get a package in the mail. So, today, it finally arrived, and I'm pleased to announce that, in fact, the Guild has exceeded my hopes: I've been assigned Cabel Sasser!

The guild lists these qualifications for his arch-nemesis status:

• Goes to the same events as I do, but gives better presentations than me,
  
• Wins enough design awards to give me a run for my money,
  
• Funnier blog,
  
• Singing talent much more impressive than my nice shirts,
  
• He has the exclusive license to sell katamari t-shirts in the U.S. I don't know if I'd like to sell them or not, but, you know, it'd be nice to have the option. Nobody even asked me.
  
• Apparently *cough* as talented with the ladies *cough* if you get my drift. Like, in bed. If you can see where I'm going. Sex. (-Wink!-)
  

All-in-all, I couldn't have asked for a better choice! Hopefully Cabel's already received his welcome packet and is preparing nefarious deeds against me as I type this -- I know I am!

Originally posted by Wil Shipley from Call Me Fishmeal., on August 17, 2007 1:19 PM

If you make it out to Shea Stadium the rest of this season and next season, and you witness a Mets home run, be sure to wave bye-bye to the Home Run Apple. We previously wrote about the movement to save the Home Run Apple when the Mets move to Citi Field in 2009, but recent reports makes it look like its days are numbered. The Times reported yesterday that the apple will be retired during the move to the new stadium. Dave Howard, the Mets executive VP of business operations told The Times that "We are considering various possibilities to have it on display for our fans at Citi Field." Howard previously told the Daily News that "I appreciate the passion, but fans don't understand the reality that this particular apple is barely holding on and it wouldn't make any sense to use it in that manner. We will save it in an appropriate way." At least it's good to hear that the team won't be selling "authentic Home Run Apple Slices" to add to its revenue stream. Despite the quotes out of the Mets front office, the two guys behind SaveTheApple.com are still hoping that the Shea apple sits just beyond the outfield walls at Citi Field. Their online petition now has 3736 signatures. Photo of the Home Run Apple in 1994 by Triborough on flickr

Originally posted by tien from Gothamist Weekly Favorites, on August 17, 2007 12:47 PM

Do you want some del.icio.us stickers? Or a few del.icio.us bookmarks - the kind you put inside books? We have a surplus of dots here at the tag mines, and we'd like to distribute them more evenly around the world. To get some schwag, mail a self-addressed stamped envelope to the following address:

Yahoo! Inc.
c/o del.icio.us
2821 Mission College Blvd.
Santa Clara, CA 95054-1838

We'll fill it with goodies and send it back to you. If you want to, include a note with your username, email address, and a comment or suggestion about del.icio.us: something you dislike, a story about how you use it, a feature we should add, or something like that. We'll include a del.icio.us t-shirt for the people with the most useful and amusing notes, and they'll entertain me while I suffer paper cuts from opening a zillion envelopes.

Britta Gustafson
community manager intern

Originally posted by britta from del.icio.us, on August 17, 2007 12:15 PM

Rands on the cover design of his new book, Managing Humans:

Since I signed the contract, I’d pessimistically prepared myself for the fact that I had no idea how much work I was signing up for, I’d end up hating some of my favorite chapters via the editing process, and that the initial covers would suck. I knew they’d suck because I knew the cover had to be great. Knowing that nothing is great in its first iteration meant I didn’t think twice about moving on and calling in reinforcements.

I love looking at rejected designs, especially when they’re rejected because they don’t feel right even though they look good.

 ★ 

Originally posted by John Gruber from Daring Fireball, on August 17, 2007 12:11 PM

I'm somewhat glad that I don't know what mangosteens taste like; otherwise I might shell out $11 just for one piece of the fruit primarily grown in Thailand. Gersh Kuntzman only indulged in two pieces at a gourmet greengrocer in Brooklyn, lest he wanted to refinance his house. Although Kuntzman happily tore into his $45-a-pound fruit, his wife was less impressed:

"Face it, at $45 a pound, this mangosteen should come in a limousine with a chauffer who also cleans our kitchen. Besides, the joy of eating a mangosteen is eating it in Thailand. Imagine sending a Bagel Hole bagel to your brother in North Carolina. It’s not even worth the bother."

I think I'll skip out on trying a mangosteen stateside for now—it gives me all the more reason for me to visit Thailand.

Of course, if you do want to try them Stateside, shipments of Puerto Rico–grown mangosteens started arriving on these shores earlier this month. (Those grown in Thailand are banned from the U.S. because of concerns over insect infestation.)

The season is short, and only two outlets have distribution deals—Melissa's World Variety Produce in Los Angeles and Baldor in New York City.

Photograph from DiemThuyen on Flickr

Originally posted by Robyn Lee from Serious Eats: Main, on August 17, 2007 10:45 AM

More Talk, Less Rock: 15 Masters Of Onstage Banter

3. Paul Stanley
A CD-length file of Paul Stanley's onstage yelling made the Internet rounds starting in 2005, and the Kiss guitarist's effeminate, positive-power ("You people are dynamite!") insanity made him sound like a hyperactive motivational speaker. The 86-megabyte file sounds pristine, too; if Steve Albini ever recorded between-song banter, it would sound like this. Named People, Let Me Get This Off My Chest, the 70-track collection features every rock 'n' roll cliché known to man. Stanley screams dedications to "young" women ("We got any little girls out there tonight?"), temperature (via the endless ways that "Hotter Than Hell" and "Firehouse" can be introduced), and booze (simply "ALLCOOOHAAALL!!!!"). Also: "How many of you gals out there like to get licked?! Okay, how many of you guys out there like to get licked?" And that's just the first 10 minutes.

9. Fugazi
"I saw you two guys earlier at the Good Humor truck, and you were eating your ice cream like little boys, and I thought, 'Those guys aren't so tough! They're eating ice cream.' I saw you eating an ice-cream cone, pal... You're bad now, but I saw you... That's the shit you can't hide. You eat ice cream; everybody knows it. Ice-cream-eating motherfucker, that's what you are."

Originally posted by jwz@jwz.org from jwz, on August 17, 2007 10:23 AM

Yesterday, the federal government approved $354 Million for New York City to spend towards its congestion pricing plan. As details of the funding come out, we learn that the money doesn't come without a catch. Most of the funds that the Department of Transportation agreed to give the city yesterday are for mass transit improvements, like the construction of bus depots. It left the city to come up with the estimated $223 million to actually install the system that monitors traffic and charges vehicles entering the congestion zone. Mayor Bloomberg asked the federal government to fund $179 million for technology, but they approved a mere $10 million for it. While the city gets $1.6 million of the funds immediately for planning and development, the bulk of funding is contingent on approval by city and state officials by March. U.S. Secretary of Transportation Mary Peters said, "If the city does not have the legal authority to move forward at that time, it will not receive the money." The Post also has a nice graphic of how the $354 million is allocated. Of course Bloomberg was not discouraged by the way the funds are designated, "I think that rather than look at the money we didn’t get, we should look at the money we did get. It’s a unique opportunity for New York, and we should really say, thank you." Mayor Bloomberg's congestion pricing plan for NYC appeared stalled until Bloomberg and the state legislature agreed to a commission to traffic reduction in NYC. Bloomberg's orginal plan called for an $8 fee for vehicles and $21 for trucks entering Manhattan below 86th St. Photo of a traffic control box by MurphyZero on flickr

Originally posted by tien from Gothamist Weekly Favorites, on August 17, 2007 10:14 AM

Great piece by Daniel Jalkut on the indie Mac developer community:

Consider the most popular, trendiest retail district in your town. There are many shops whose target markets overlap, and to some extent each shop is competing with the others to attract customers through their doors. But the district wouldn’t exist at all without the collective commitment to quality.

#

Originally posted by John Gruber from Daring Fireball, on August 17, 2007 10:07 AM

Daniel Jalkut: “With rare exception, it’s the environment that brings the customers, not the individual retailers themselves. This is why Banana Republic would rather be situated next to Abercrombie & Fitch than next to Ross.”

Originally posted by Brent Simmons from ranchero.com, on August 17, 2007 9:21 AM

Huge improvements to event handling.

#

Originally posted by John Gruber from Daring Fireball, on August 17, 2007 8:26 AM

My fellow nerds, the moment we've waited more than two decades for has apparently arrived.

Soundwave has arrived. He really transforms. And he really plays music.

Originally posted by Anil from Anil Dash, on August 17, 2007 8:19 AM

"47 Stocks in the Delicious Bookmark Counts market. 13 August 2007. Poster showing the activities of each stock in the Delicious Bookmark Counts market. Download the two A3 page PDF poster. Print it, show it, poke it."

Originally posted by Michal Migurski from tecznotes links, on August 17, 2007 8:08 AM

Twelve ways I change the world.

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Ftrain.com, on August 16, 2007 11:00 PM

I work with wonderful Jane. She has chickens in her yard running around. And she gets fresh eggs from them. From time to time, if you bring in an egg carton, she will come back with fresh eggs for you. I've been meaning to bring a carton in forever, but always forget. Today, coming out of a meeting after Jane had left, I found a carton on my desk with the following note:

From Frisky, Wiskey, and Margarita, and the hens across the street. Enjoy!

I sure will. I've heard about Frisky, Wiskey, and Margarita. And now my family and I will enjoy their hard made eggs. Thank you! How special to have such a close connection to what I'm eating.

I love that we can live in SF, and I can work with someone who has hens, and names and loves their hens! And her neighbor has hens too!

I'm so glad that the demand for cage-free, organically fed chicken eggs are so much on the rise that demand is outgrowing supply. And I'm very happy that there is a lot of organic veges I can buy very easily.

Originally posted by Mie from Kokochi, on August 16, 2007 10:06 PM

Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped more than 300 points by mid-day as worldwide financial markets worry about the U.S. credit market. The Dow Jones, as well as the Standard & Poor's 500 and Nasdaq, have lost 10% since July, and a strategist at Absolute Strategy Research tells the Times, "The psychology is shifting notably today. When a market drops by 10 percent, people start to feel it in their portfolios. People are used to stock markets behaving in a non-volatile and even bullish manner.” Trading curbs were even put in place at the NYSE. Speaking of volatile, the Chicago Board Options Exchange Volatility Index says this is the most volatile period since October 2002. The Federal Reserve injected $17 billion into the system this morning, but, the Wall Street Journal reports, "momentum faded quickly amid the specter of global economic problems." Also, mortgage lender Countrywide tapped its entire $11.5 billion line of credit. This is probably why you haven't seen your friends, neighbors or commuters who work in the finance industry very much lately! Two quotes from the Wall Street Journal:

"Everything is eroding, and people are just selling and taking profits where they can. Maybe there's some panic selling as well," said Stephen Carl, head trader at Williams Capital. "People have taken money off the table." "I think we're at a critical level, and it's important that the market holds here," said Ted Weisberg, floor trader at Seaport Securities. "If it trades below this, you're going to start to get rhetoric that we're in a bear market."

Panic AND rhetoric in the midst. And if you're trying to get a loan for a mortgage these days, good luck - even with good salaries and great credit, you may be screwed. Update: Thanks to an end-of-the-day rally, the stock market erased most of its losses. From Bloomberg: "The S&P 500 advanced 4.57, or 0.3 percent, to 1,411.27. The Dow average lost 15.69, or 0.1 percent, to 12,845.78 after earlier falling 344 points. The Nasdaq Composite Index slipped 7.76, or 0.3 percent, to 2,451.07." Photograph of New York Stock Exchange traders by Richard Drew/AP

Originally posted by jen from Gothamist Weekly Favorites, on August 16, 2007 8:26 PM

How do you rack up a $600 iPhone bill from AT&T during just 48 hours in Canada, even if you’re being careful not to place unnecessary calls or use the Internet? Forget to turn off the MobileMail auto-checking.

#

Originally posted by John Gruber from Daring Fireball, on August 16, 2007 7:54 PM

a proposal for information displays to be placed in main streetside entrance of the planned Transbay Transit Center & Tower in downtown San Francisco. the displays are meant to convey live graphic train scheduling, & densities in the urban fabric formed by the intersection of various transit routes.

trains, buses & other transit types are tracked, & their positions & times to departure are indicated by their distance from the outside edge of the building. over time, passengers could develop a mental model of the transit system at various times throughout the day. a live display of the various transportation networks reveals the current state to the travelers, to allow them to understand the current range of transportation possibilities available to them, & make better decisions on where to go and when.

[link: stamen.com|thnkx Tom!]

Originally posted by (author unknown) from information aesthetics, on August 16, 2007 5:32 PM

"Software that blocks all advertisement is an infringement of the rights of web site owners and developers. Numerous web sites exist in order to provide quality content in exchange for displaying ads. Accessing the content while blocking the ads, therefore would be no less than stealing. Millions of hard working people are being robbed of their time and effort by this type of software."

Originally posted by Michal Migurski from tecznotes links, on August 16, 2007 5:00 PM

    

    

    

…no two are the same.

Photos from Linda Cronin, David G Kelly, fotosmart.at , Olo Kunovsky, Tetsuya Blues, and heavenuphere. As suggested by Dave Gorman in Flickr Central. See more photos of electricity pylons in this “electricity” cluster.

Originally posted by Heather Champ from Flickr Blog, on August 16, 2007 3:55 PM

Check out the latest plugin from the community: real time visitor statistics for your Movable Type 4.0 dashboard. Mark Carey, the developer of the plugin and the guy behind the very popular site MT Hacks has been busy building a number of different plugins specifically designed for MT4, not to mention updating some of his other popular plugins like Fast Search and some user interface plugins to customize the user interface to work better for him.

And that's not all, the community has produced a number of other great plugins in the last couple of days. For example, those of you pining for the olden days, Arvind has made a great retro dashboard widget called "My Blogs" which surfaces an MT3 style blog listing widget for your MT4 dashboard. Cool!

And for those of you pining for the even older days, you might recognize the name of another one of our plugin authors: Ben Trott. His Refeed plugin makes it easier than ever to turn any RSS or Atom feed into posts on your blog. I know I plan to use this plugin personally to aggregate my twitters, my Flickr photos, my Vox posts into a single unified system.

What plugins would you like to see the community work on?

Originally posted by Byrne Reese from MovableType.org - Home for the MT Community, on August 16, 2007 12:59 PM

World’s toughest programmer (as seen here) has a thoughtful new weblog.

#

Originally posted by John Gruber from Daring Fireball, on August 16, 2007 11:41 AM

Max Roach, 1924-2007


Our prayers go out to the Roach family.

In the early 1980s, Max Roach did a series of shows downtown with Fab Five Freddy taking the mic, angering lots of jazz purists. In defense, he launched one of the most famous defenses of rap music and hip-hop in a famous interview with Fab. (If memory serves, this ran in SPIN Magazine.):

The thing that frightened people about hip-hop was that they heard rhythm--rhythm for rhythm's sake. Hip-hop lives in a world of sound--not the world of music--and that's why it's so revolutionary. What we as Black people have always done is show that the world of sound is bigger than white people think. There are many areas that fall outside the narrow Western definition of music and hip-hop is one of them.

Originally posted by Zentronix from zentronix: dubwise & hiphopcentric, on August 16, 2007 10:52 AM

Delve into the frighteningly vast world of England's fried chicken joints at Bad Gas' Fried Chicken Gallery. This is the kind of subject I could imagine a food studies student writing a research paper on ("The Cross-Cultural Implications of American Fried Chicken in the United Kingdom"), perhaps using Bad Gas' observations of the general fried chicken design aesthetic as a starting point:

1. Only use red, white and blue if possible. This creates a strong association with America. Which is a "good" thing.
2. Ensure that the words "Fried" and "Chicken" appear in your shop's name.
3. To avoid alienating illiterate chicken lovers, make sure the sign has a nice big picture of a bird.
4. Strengthen that KFC association by ensuring that your shop's name includes the name of a southern US state.
5. If all the southern states have been used up by your many competitors along the street, pick a state from somewhere else in the US.
6. If you can't think of any more US states, use a word that has some kind of southern US resonance.
7. If all else fails, throw in a word that suggests quality, friendliness or corporate success.

Bad Gas also helpfully provides a list of all the shop names and notes patterns in chicken logo design.

Originally posted by Robyn Lee from Serious Eats: Main, on August 16, 2007 9:15 AM

I'm off to San Francisco and then 37° 26' 34 N, 122° 9' 40 W and surrounding blocks for Barcamp Block.

Everytime I see the Golden Gate Bridge I wonder how Joseph Strauss convinced everyone that it could be done. It would of been interesting to see how he got everyone to sign off on the idea.

Originally posted by Drew from Dembot, on August 16, 2007 8:56 AM

From the looks of these photos, the commute home for those on the L train was no fun last night. On the same day that riders on the line were asked to rate the service, service came to a halt during the evening rush. Who's to blame? It seems like the MTA actually gets a pass this time. Rumor has it that someone pulled the emergency brake. The MTA is looking for riders to fill out a "Rider Report Card" for all the lines right now (all languages). MTA Executive Director and CEO writes to readers, "This survey will measure your experience with our service and help us direct our resources to the areas where they are most needed. Your ride is our responsibility. Your trip should be on time, clean, and comfortable, and announcements should be clear and informative. Your comments count. Our goal is to serve you better." Uh huh. If you took the L train last night, how messed up was your commute? Photo on left by lauratitian on flickr; Photo on right by Zach Klein on flickr

Originally posted by tien from Gothamist Weekly Favorites, on August 16, 2007 7:48 AM

amazing

 bookmark this on del.icio.us - posted by lauren_cornell to art oliver_laric - more about this bookmark...

Originally posted by lauren_cornell from del.icio.us/lauren_cornell, on August 16, 2007 7:22 AM

We had a great session yesterday at UX Week 2007 where I got the chance to talk with Lori Adams and Dermot Waters of CNN.com about the experience strategy Adaptive Path helped them develop for their recent relaunch and the work their teams put into implementing it.

When CNN asked us to help them develop a vision for the future of online news, we were excited to be a part of it, as any agency would. But that excitement was soon tempered by the sheer scale of the challenge. We’ve worked on products for a mass audience before, but news is something that practically everyone uses almost every day.

For that reason, our research study looked at news consumption behavior patterns in general, not only online. To create a successful online news product, we had to know how it would fit in with the other ways people got their news. We created a set of personas based on the research. These turned out to be a huge hit at CNN — they’re now a permanent fixture around the newsroom, in the form of life-sized cardboard cutouts. They help the team maintain a firm sense of user needs and expectations.

We then went to work creating the experience strategy for CNN.com. This was a huge undertaking that required close collaboration between Adaptive Path and the CNN team. We solicited participation from dozens of stakeholders, and incorporated their input into the strategy by way of lots of collaborative working sessions in San Francisco and Atlanta. We delivered the strategy as a set of posters that could be hung up around the newsroom to evangelize the site’s new direction. We then fleshed out that direction as a design concept through a set of wireframes and navigation and interaction flows.

Then CNN carried that design work forward into implementation, iterating our wireframes and building a prototype to test with users. They used their company’s size to their advantage by deploying a private beta to CNN’s thousands of employees. The design looks smooth and simple on the outside, but there’s a lot of complexity just below the surface. Their design and technology teams put in an enormous amount of work to turn those early concepts into a reality.

One part of their approach that I liked a lot was the sequestering the relaunch team, completely isolating them from daily operations — literally moving them across town (to some office space at their sister channel, Cartoon Network). I also liked their solution to collaborative requirements gathering and management: a wiki.

As with any big redesign effort, they had to set some priorities, and some of my favorite parts of our experience strategy haven’t been implemented in this initial version. On a separate note, doing a case study at a conference as a conversation rather than a presentation really worked well. It was more fun for us on stage, and I think it was more fun for the audience as well.

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Originally posted by Jesse James Garrett from Adaptive Path, on August 16, 2007 6:56 AM

At last, a smart personal tribute to Bergman. Thank you Woody.

via NYTimes:

The Man Who Asked Hard Questions
By WOODY ALLEN
Published: August 12, 2007

I GOT the news in Oviedo, a lovely little town in the north of Spain where I am shooting a movie, that Bergman had died. A phone message from a mutual friend was relayed to me on the set. Bergman once told me he didn’t want to die on a sunny day, and not having been there, I can only hope he got the flat weather all directors thrive on.

I’ve said it before to people who have a romanticized view of the artist and hold creation sacred: In the end, your art doesn’t save you. No matter what sublime works you fabricate (and Bergman gave us a menu of amazing movie masterpieces) they don’t shield you from the fateful knocking at the door that interrupted the knight and his friends at the end of “The Seventh Seal.” And so, on a summer’s day in July, Bergman, the great cinematic poet of mortality, couldn’t prolong his own inevitable checkmate, and the finest filmmaker of my lifetime was gone.

I have joked about art being the intellectual’s Catholicism, that is, a wishful belief in an afterlife. Better than to live on in the hearts and minds of the public is to live on in one’s apartment, is how I put it. And certainly Bergman’s movies will live on and will be viewed at museums and on TV and sold on DVDs, but knowing him, this was meager compensation, and I am sure he would have been only too glad to barter each one of his films for an additional year of life. This would have given him roughly 60 more birthdays to go on making movies; a remarkable creative output. And there’s no doubt in my mind that’s how he would have used the extra time, doing the one thing he loved above all else, turning out films.

Bergman enjoyed the process. He cared little about the responses to his films. It pleased him when he was appreciated, but as he told me once, “If they don’t like a movie I made, it bothers me — for about 30 seconds.” He wasn’t interested in box office results, even though producers and distributors called him with the opening weekend figures, which went in one ear and out the other. He said, “By mid-week their wildly optimistic prognosticating would come down to nothing.” He enjoyed critical acclaim but didn’t for a second need it, and while he wanted the audience to enjoy his work, he didn’t always make his films easy on them.

Still, those that took some figuring out were well worth the effort. For example, when you grasp that both women in “The Silence” are really only two warring aspects of one woman, the otherwise enigmatic film opens up spellbindingly. Or if you are up on your Danish philosophy before you see “The Seventh Seal” or “The Magician,” it certainly helps, but so amazing were his gifts as a storyteller that he could hold an audience riveted and enthralled with difficult material. I’ve heard people walk out after certain films of his saying, “I didn’t get exactly what I just saw but I was gripped on the edge of my seat every frame.”

Bergman’s allegiance was to theatricality, and he was also a great stage director, but his movie work wasn’t just informed by theater; it drew on painting, music, literature and philosophy. His work probed the deepest concerns of humanity, often rendering these celluloid poems profound. Mortality, love, art, the silence of God, the difficulty of human relationships, the agony of religious doubt, failed marriage, the inability for people to communicate with one another.

And yet the man was a warm, amusing, joking character, insecure about his immense gifts, beguiled by the ladies. To meet him was not to suddenly enter the creative temple of a formidable, intimidating, dark and brooding genius who intoned complex insights with a Swedish accent about man’s dreadful fate in a bleak universe. It was more like this: “Woody, I have this silly dream where I show up on the set to make a film and I can’t figure out where to put the camera; the point is, I know I am pretty good at it and I have been doing it for years. You ever have those nervous dreams?” or “You think it will be interesting to make a movie where the camera never moves an inch and the actors just enter and exit frame? Or would people just laugh at me?”

What does one say on the phone to a genius? I didn’t think it was a good idea, but in his hands I guess it would have turned out to be something special. After all, the vocabulary he invented to probe the psychological depths of actors also would have sounded preposterous to those who learn filmmaking in the orthodox manner. In film school (I was thrown out of New York University quite rapidly when I was a film major there in the 1950s) the emphasis was always on movement. These are moving pictures, students were taught, and the camera should move. And the teachers were right. But Bergman would put the camera on Liv Ullmann’s face or Bibi Andersson’s face and leave it there and it wouldn’t budge and time passed and more time and an odd and wonderful thing unique to his brilliance would happen. One would get sucked into the character and one was not bored but thrilled.

Bergman, for all his quirks and philosophic and religious obsessions, was a born spinner of tales who couldn’t help being entertaining even when all on his mind was dramatizing the ideas of Nietzsche or Kierkegaard. I used to have long phone conversations with him. He would arrange them from the island he lived on. I never accepted his invitations to visit because the plane travel bothered me, and I didn’t relish flying on a small aircraft to some speck near Russia for what I envisioned as a lunch of yogurt. We always discussed movies, and of course I let him do most of the talking because I felt privileged hearing his thoughts and ideas. He screened movies for himself every day and never tired of watching them. All kinds, silents and talkies. To go to sleep he’d watch a tape of the kind of movie that didn’t make him think and would relax his anxiety, sometimes a James Bond film.

Like all great film stylists, such as Fellini, Antonioni and Buñuel, for example, Bergman has had his critics. But allowing for occasional lapses all these artists’ movies have resonated deeply with millions all over the world. Indeed, the people who know film best, the ones who make them — directors, writers, actors, cinematographers, editors — hold Bergman’s work in perhaps the greatest awe.

Because I sang his praises so enthusiastically over the decades, when he died many newspapers and magazines called me for comments or interviews. As if I had anything of real value to add to the grim news besides once again simply extolling his greatness. How had he influenced me, they asked? He couldn’t have influenced me, I said, he was a genius and I am not a genius and genius cannot be learned or its magic passed on.

When Bergman emerged in the New York art houses as a great filmmaker, I was a young comedy writer and nightclub comic. Can one’s work be influenced by Groucho Marx and Ingmar Bergman? But I did manage to absorb one thing from him, a thing not dependent on genius or even talent but something that can actually be learned and developed. I am talking about what is often very loosely called a work ethic but is really plain discipline.

I learned from his example to try to turn out the best work I’m capable of at that given moment, never giving in to the foolish world of hits and flops or succumbing to playing the glitzy role of the film director, but making a movie and moving on to the next one. Bergman made about 60 films in his lifetime, I have made 38. At least if I can’t rise to his quality maybe I can approach his quantity.

Originally posted by joy garnett from NEWSgrist - where spin is art, on August 16, 2007 6:18 AM

The news that food bloggers are going legit and entering the mainstream hit the blogosphere like the food equivalent of a new Paris Hilton sex tape. First Restaurant Girl (AKA Danyelle Freeman) is slipping into Pascale La Draoulec's old restaurant critic spot at the New York Daily News. Forget for a moment whether Freeman is qualified for the job, or whether her breathy purple prose style is appropriate for a newspaper restaurant critic's voice, or finally whether the fact that she's known to every restaurateur and chef in town is a problem. The real story here is that a young woman who started a New York restaurant food blog (in her case it's really a journal or a diary as she doesn't do much linking) has one of the half-dozen restaurant critic jobs at a major New York media outlet with over a million readers. Love Danyelle or hate her, her ascension signals the arrival of food bloggers into the old media mainstream. Sure, her industry-friendly statement that "I want to give chefs and restaurants their best opportunity to communicate a vision," would send editors at places like the Times and New York Magazine into apoplexy. The blogosphere had its knives out ready to pounce. A commenter on the Eater thread: "She's a nice girl who turned a blog that shills for restaurants in exchange for free meals into a job where she can shill (for) restaurants and get paid for it by the NYDN. Mazel Tov." What will be interesting to find out is whether they are going to let Danyelle keep writing Restaurant Girl and whether her Daily News reviews will be simultaneously posted on her blog and in the paper.

Still buzzing about Restaurant Girl, the blogosphere and the food media turned its attention to last night's Top Chef episode.

I just about dropped my Haagen Dazs Pomegranate Chocolate bar when I spotted Andrea Strong at the judge's table sharing a meal at the judge's table with Tom Colicchio, Daniel Boulud, Ted Allen, and the almost supernaturally beautiful Padma Lakshi. She wasn't supered, identified, or referred to in the conversation about the food. She never uttered a word. Why is she there supping with the judges? I thought to myself.

Why she was there became readily apparent each time one of the two competing chef teams was called to face the judges. Tom Colicchio told each team that a food blogger had been in the house. The camera panned to the chef teams grimacing at the very mention of food blogs. Tom and Padma kept taking turns reading Andrea Strong's simulated blog entry. Each recitaton of phrases like "gummy risotto" and "hopelessly oversmoked potatoes," and "hideous" decor brought a look of horror and resignation to the competing chef's teams (along with knowing half-smiles from Colicchio and Boulud, who have each felt the sharpness of a blogger's keyboard-driven daggers).

Again, what's important is not whether we think Andrea Strong is a great restaurant critic or a great blogger or deserves to be taken seriously critiquing food with Daniel Boulud and Tom Colicchio. The news here is that the producers of Top Chef (along with what must have been the tacit approval of Colicchio) have perhaps permanently elevated the status of food bloggers everywhere. When Tom Colicchio and Lakshi are reading Strong's words back to the competing chefs, what they are saying is that these words (presumably written by Andrea Strong. though they were pretty harsh, not exactly Andrea's stock in trade) are credible, legitimate, and worthy of discussion. In other words, a blogger's reaction matters. It carries some real weight. Add in the already-or-about-to-be-published books by 101 Cookbook's Heidi Swanson, the Amateur Gourmet's Adam Roberts, and Chocolate and Zucchini's Clotilde Dusoulier, and the only conclusion you can draw is that food bloggers are entering mainstream culture and infusing old media with new life.

The genie has left the bottle, or should I say the blogger has left the computer screen. Food media will never be the same.

Originally posted by Ed Levine from Serious Eats: Main, on August 16, 2007 4:59 AM

Which down-to-earth superstar, who knows how to keep 'em coming back for more, gave this quote:

"Everyone's in such a rush to show they're sexy. Anyone can be sexy. We all have the same body parts. It's pretty boring. Life's not so short that you need to give it all away in five seconds. That was never my thing."

Is it:
Gwen Stefani
Scarlett Johannson
Angelina Jolie
Halle Berry

Take your guesses and check back later for the big reveal!

Originally posted by Tracy Pepey from Daily Blabber, on August 16, 2007 4:35 AM

Mike Steinberger on the unsurpassed (and very French) pleasure of drinking chilled red wine in the summer.

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Rebecca's Pocket, on August 16, 2007 4:30 AM

Discover magazine has an article on '10 unsolved mysteries of the brain' which describes some of the biggest challenges in contemporary neuroscience.

It's an interesting list, not least because you'll notice that several of the problems are conceptual rather than empirical.

For example, the list includes 'What are emotions?', 'What is intelligence?' and 'What is consciousness?' that depend on a good philosophical analysis rather than just more data gathering.

In contrast, some of the other mysteries include things such as 'How is information coded in neural activity?' which is a problem of dealing with the complexity of the signals and their effect, rather than us having problems with defining any of the problem.

The fact that brain research relies as much on conceptual developments as laboratory work is one reason why philosophers are so important to cognitive science.

I like to think of them as conceptual engineers.

Link to Discover article '10 Unsolved Mysteries Of The Brain'.

Originally posted by vaughan from Mind Hacks, on August 16, 2007 4:00 AM

Stewart posted a photo:

Originally posted by Stewart from Sylloge, on August 16, 2007 12:39 AM

OMG, do you think they disclose the interestingness algorithm?

Originally posted by Michael Sippey from (un)filtered, on August 15, 2007 11:13 PM

From best of craigslist (where user generated content goes to shine), this listing offering a potato cannon. Look, I'll save you the trouble and quote the whole thing since I know you're too lazy to click through: "It's 8ft long. My neighbors figured out what was happening so I need to get rid of it today."

Originally posted by Michael Sippey from (un)filtered, on August 15, 2007 11:08 PM

Regarding the suit against YouTube brought on by Viacom (MTV, Paramount Pictures, Nickelodeon and Comedy Central, etc.), Larry Neumeister from the Associated Press writes: "YouTube didn't say exactly what it intended to gain from questioning the Comedy Central comedians. Colbert hosts "The Colbert Report," a spin-off of "The Daily Show," which is hosted by Stewart."

It seems clear to me that YouTube would like the court to hear Stewart and Colbert's perception of the harm vs. gain argument. It's hard to imagine that the widespread distribution of the Daily Show on YouTube could harm or take away from the show's value compared to the massive PR gain that drives traffic back to their program along with elevating their cultural relevance.

Originally posted by Drew from Dembot, on August 15, 2007 10:24 PM

a world map illustrating the origin & content of the most popular search queries via Google, revealing the preferences & interests of the world population. the map is based on data from the Google Zeitgeist statistics of 30 different countries from April to June 2006.

[link: incom.org]

Originally posted by (author unknown) from information aesthetics, on August 15, 2007 7:34 PM

Oh, gooey cookie innards, how I bow down to thee. These are not the innards of just any cookie, but of Tina's Levain Bakery cookie, a heavenly 6-ounce boulder of sweet, buttery chocolate chip and walnut-laden underbaked cookie dough encased in a thin crispy shell. Tina says, "If you're a woman who's undergoing PMS, this will totally satiate that craving we all have during that time." I'm worried that I may have this craving all the time, no PMS required.

Originally posted by Robyn Lee from Serious Eats: Main, on August 15, 2007 2:30 PM

I haven’t had much luck grilling corn this year. Because it seems like such an easy process, I went in blind and managed to disfigure nearly every cob that’s touched my grill. Too much good Midwestern corn had been sacrificed because of my utter lack of knowledge. It was time to get serious. So I researched, tried a few out, and then finally remembered something I’d seen at the Red Hook Ball Fields in Brooklyn.

This website certainly loves the place, and I’ll continue that adoration. I would have never, ever put this combo together had I not seen it with my own eyes. The vendor grilled the corn with the husks on until they had been scorched. Then he would remove the husks, grill it again until the kernels had blistered, slather it with mayonnaise, sprinkle the whole thing with a crumbly cheese, and then pour hot sauce straight on. The technique works—especially if you soak the corn before grilling it—even if the topping doesn’t sound immediately appetizing. It didn’t sound too promising to me, either. But it works, especially if you can find Cotija cheese at your local Mexican market.

Oh, and that nice young lady in the picture supplied all of the corn from her family farm. For this we thank her.

Grilled Corn (Red Hook Ball Field Style)

Ingredients

4 to 8 ears of corn
1/4 pound Cotija cheese, or any cheese that could be sprinkled, such as feta or Parmesan
Mayonnaise
Hot sauce

Procedure

1. Dump the corn into a large pot and fill with water. Let them soak for 1/2 an hour to an hour.

2. Start the grill. Add the corn and cook for about 10-15 minutes, or until the utter husks have a nice char to them.

3. Remove the husks and place back on the grill. Cook until some of the kernels have blackened.

4. Slather the corn with mayonnaise, sprinkle with cheese, and dot with some hot sauce if you can handle it.

Originally posted by Nick Kindelsperger from Serious Eats: Main, on August 15, 2007 1:15 PM

For those of you too cheap (or too far away) to buy a copy of this month’s Macworld on the newsstand, here’s my latest back-page column:

This history is analogous to that of the automobile industry. In its early years, the state of the art advanced at a remarkable clip. Today, new cars come out each year, but with small refinements. Those changes add up: a 1997 car (even in mint condition) is clearly distinguishable from a 2007 model. But a 2005 and a 2008? Not so much. That’s pretty much where we are with OS X. Tiger is the 2005 model; Leopard is the 2008.

#

Originally posted by John Gruber from Daring Fireball, on August 15, 2007 12:20 PM

You: A hot, shapely Italian number that I can place my burning wood in.

Me: An eager young pizzaiolo used to playing with fire. I've played around most of my life; now looking to settle down with the right oven.

In the San Francisco Bay Area, champion pizza-maker Tony Gemignani hopes to open a wood-burning pizzeria with an oven worthy of his talent, according to a story in the San Francisco Chronicle.

Gemignani, long known in the pizza world for his pizza-spinning techniques (he's been called "the Michael Jordan of pizza-tossing"), got tired of dough acrobatics a couple years ago and started to focus on making true Neapolitan-style pies.

After installing a portable Beehive oven in his backyard and practicing the craft, he went to Italy to compete in the Trofeo Citta de Napoli Championato Internationale per Pizzaioli in June. And he won.

"It was a big win," he said. "People are comparing it to Stag's Leap (Wine Cellars) going to Paris," and beating the best French Bordeaux makers in the 1976 tasting that put California Cabernet Sauvignon on the map.

Trouble is, strict air-quality standards in the Napa Valley usually don't allow for wood-burning ovens there.

But the Vera Pizza Napoletana association (aka "the Pizza Police") is going to allow Gemignani and his brothers to open a pizza school under its aegis. If so, Gemignani and family hope to talk the local government into making an exception. As the Chronicle says, "If that happens, they hope to start construction late this before year and move from their current location in a strip mall near Interstate 580."

Originally posted by Adam Kuban from Serious Eats: Main, on August 15, 2007 11:17 AM

Jimmy Fallon is getting hitched to Drew Barrymore's best friend and business partner, Nancy Juvonen.

According to People.com, the proposal took place in New Hampshire "last weekend on the dock at sunset at the Junoven's family home in Wolfeboro on Lake Winnipesaukee, where On Golden Pond was filmed... He presented her with a one-of-a-kind ring designed by Neil Lane."

This will be a first marriage for the couple, who met on the set of the bummer flick Fever Pitch. Drew and Jimmy costarred and the film was produced by Drew and Nancy's prod company, Flower Films.

So maybe the reason the former Saturday Night Live funnyman's career is slumping is because he's been spending so much time with his lady? We'll forgive him for that. Congrats!

Originally posted by sbyrne from Daily Blabber, on August 15, 2007 11:12 AM

Todd Gibson, who is sitting in for Tyler Green at Modern Art Notes, speculates that the art market bubble has already started to burst, and that the credit crunch will continue to hurt "the small subset of the NetJets-set who do the art fair and contemporary auction circuit with checkbooks in hand."[1]

Here's the key point in Gibson's post; that the market for the ultra high end of the contemporary art market is very small:

The law of pricing in the secondary art market is that it takes only two people with money to push the value of Peter Doig's work to $11.2MM. Or the value of a Rothko painting to $72.8MM. Or a Picasso to $104MM. If only one of the two doesn't have that extra $10MM or $70MM or $100MM anymore, the work is no longer worth that amount.

Art Basel Miami will be the true test. From what I've heard the past few years have been frothy; by December we'll know whether or not the bubble has truly burst. Will as many pop stars and hedge fund managers be making the rounds with their art buyers as in years past?[2]

[1] Don't bubbles burst immediately? If a bubble "starts" to burst, doesn't it just burst with a bang? Dear popular press, please invent a different metaphor than "bubble" because even if there is rapid decline, it's not a burst.

[2] Comments are open for the hell of it.

Originally posted by Michael Sippey from (un)filtered, on August 15, 2007 10:52 AM

Long list of new features.

#

Originally posted by John Gruber from Daring Fireball, on August 15, 2007 10:10 AM

Spotted something green in the Hudson recently?

Could well be [The Science Barge] -- an entirely self-sustainable urban farm that's touring New York City’s public waterfront parks this summer, offering sustainability education programs to wide audiences. Designed by New York Sun Works, it comes complete with solar panels, rain collecting irrigators, and wind turbines. The barge grows cucumbers, tomatoes, peppers, and some other veggies without producing any waste or using any petroleum for energy.

Why is this a good idea? More than half the world’s population now live in cities. Delivering food to them requires a transportation system that pollutes the air and water. Conventional farms use a lot of water, and fertilizers pollute streams and rivers. Traditional energy plants contribute to air pollution and global warming. If cities can produce some of their own food, energy, and water then this burden will be lighter. In a changing climate, food supplies will become unsecure in certain parts of the world. Urban agriculture protects people while it protects the environment.

The barge is currently in Riverside Park, opposite west 70th street. Go visit to learn more.

Originally posted by clairehyland from l-e-mental, on August 15, 2007 8:17 AM

A few weeks ago, the website Blackle.com crossed my path and I was instantly fascinated, but I'm going to spare you a click and give you the long and short of it: It's Google search, but it's not sponsored by Google, and its black. Fine, go. Click, I know you're going to, anyway.

Despite being a black-clad, large sunglasses-sporting stereotypical New Yorker, it wasn't the site's chi-chi and fashionable affect that drew me in, but that it was built on the notion that the color black uses less energy on the web, and even eensy amounts of savings—especially when you consider the scale of a web behemoth such as Google—add up.

Sadly, this premise that black uses less energy than white on the web has been disproven, mocked and shamed by countless writers evidently smarter than me, but I suppose in hindsight, the theory was kind of ridiculous.

But the principle behind it was not. I don't mean to break into a kind of kumbaya-style "all we are saay-iiing"–type song here, but the tiniest adjustments to energy consumption have been proven to make a difference. And in few rooms do we use energy as blindly as we do in the kitchen. Thus, I have scoured the web for small modifications you can make in your kitchen and in you cooking that have the potential to make a big difference in our overall dent on this lush, green land.

Better yet, I'm hopefully leaning on sources that will not disprove, mock, or shame you later on for your good intentions. It's a start, right? Start cookin' green after the jump.

• Unwrap Your Food: Do you come home from even a quick run to the store with nearly six plastic bags? Ever notice that when you shop at farmers' markets you come home with far fewer plastic containers, if any? There are countless ways to reduce your food supply-related waste, from reusable tote bags for every budget to voting with your dollars by patronizing stores that make an effort to reduce packaging.
  
  
• Work Your Dishwasher: Where do we begin? Most of the energy used by dishwashers is from heating the water [pdf], so check the manual for your dishwasher to see if you are able to set the heating elements to a lower temperature. More can be saved by skipping the drying cycle, propping open the door and letting the dishes air out naturally. As most new dishwashers have a seriously powerful wash cycle, water can be saved by scraping off, and not pre-soaking or pre-washing your dishes unless something is particularly gunked on. Run your dishwasher only when it is full. But whatever you do, don't feel guilty for using your dishwasher, as, according to one study, it uses only half the energy and one-sixth of the water of washing dishes by hand. Oh, and it's much more fun, but, uh, you should get a dishwasher because it's green, OK?
  
  
• Tame Your Stove, Oven: Are you sure you have to run your oven tonight? I mean, have you really thought about it? Grilling uses spectacularly less energy than an oven, and it won't undo your air conditioner's hard work. A toaster uses one-third to one-half the energy of a full-size oven. Microwaves spread far less heat. If you've got to use your stove, consider your pan size, which should match your burner size. A six-inch pan on an eight-inch burner wastes almost half the energy produced by it. All this aside, when it's broiling hot out, wouldn't you prefer a meal that didn't require cooking? Yeah, I thought so.
  
  
• Tune Your Fridge: Don’t shop for refrigerators on sticker price alone: Those with Energy Star labels use 15 percent less energy than current standards and 40 percent less than ones sold in 2001. Through-the-door water and ice dispensers and automatic icemakers can increase electricity use by up to 20 percent. Don't make them colder than needed; 37° to 40°F (3° to 4°C) is recommended for the fresh food compartment of the fridge, 5°F (-15°C) for freezers and a long-term storage freezer should be at 0°F (-18°C). Also, listen to your (or at least my) mother: "Don't go shopping in there!" As in, decide what you need before you go in, rather than spilling precious cool air out into the great hereafter.
  
  
• Lose the Bottle: As bottled water is currently going through period of bad PR of practically Lohanian proportions, I hate to beat a dead horse. But, I'm not above it, either: 30 billion single use water bottles are expected to be thrown away this year, and only 23 percent of them will be recycled. Nearly all municipal tap water in the U.S. is so good that importing a bottle from Italy, France, or the Fiji Islands is at best questionable, at worst, deplorable. Opting out of tap water sends an unintentional message that keeping the public water supply top-notch is no longer a concern. Meanwhile, reusable bottle options abound, and, considering that a full year's suggested intake of water would run you $1,400 if it was all bottled, but 49¢ if from your faucet, you might even feel generous enough to buy one for everyone you know.
  

What are your too-easy-not-to green kitchen, cooking or eating tips?

About the author: Deb Perelman writes about and photographs food incessantly in her tiny Smitten Kitchen, on the slightly less-tiny island of Manhattan.

Originally posted by Deb Perelman from Serious Eats: Main, on August 15, 2007 7:30 AM

thx mo

 bookmark this on del.icio.us - posted by lauren_cornell to art artworld funny criticism - more about this bookmark...

Originally posted by lauren_cornell from del.icio.us/lauren_cornell, on August 15, 2007 7:28 AM

Just spotted the “affordable, cool, and cheap city bikes” in Fall Colors from importer J&O. They’re also available from Dutch Bike Seattle, and at this rate, wherever fine bikes are sold.

For another flavor of Dutch Bikes, Seattle Bike Supply has Batavus in stock now and they’re shipping to their dealers after a delay.

Originally posted by DL Byron from Bike Hugger, on August 15, 2007 6:07 AM

Build Your Own Solar Cooker. Other instructions here and here.

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Social Design Notes, on August 15, 2007 4:51 AM

Before I crash for the night, I'd be remiss if I didn't congratulate my incredibly talented and passionate coworkers and thank our unbelievable community. Movable Type 4 is out the door. I think it's the best product launch I've ever been involved in during my career, and I can't wait to see the impressions of it six or twelve months down the road.

People who read this site probably know all about what a blogging platform does; You might be more interested in Why we made MT4 in the first place. (I should get bonus points for the old-school screenshot in that post.)

Originally posted by Anil from Anil Dash, on August 15, 2007 12:08 AM

out of beta with native OpenID and memcached support, among other changes  

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Waxy.org Links, on August 14, 2007 11:17 PM

When our co-founders Ben & Mena Trott first launched Movable Type almost six years ago, their words were pretty modest:

"We've never claimed to be the best. We've never presented Movable Type as the program that will revolutionize weblogging. We're just developing a system with a lot of the features that we've heard users are looking for. Luckily, we've received a lot of good word of mouth."

But while the first description of the tool was fairly modest, what's been astounding is the things people have done with the tool. And perhaps the biggest surprise to all of us who've worked on Movable Type over the years isn't that people have done amazing things with MT -- we always knew that potential was there. What we never could have guessed, what we didn't even know to hope for, was the impact that the blogs created by the Movable Type community would have on the world.

So today, almost six years later, we have that history in mind as we launch Movable Type 4. We'll naturally be talking about new features and the cool things you can do with the platform. (The movabletype.com site is a great place for getting the basic facts.) But this is movabletype.org, the home for our community, and we want to share the motivation behind the work that all of us in the MT community, both inside and outside Six Apart, do.

It's hard to remember what the web was like when Movable Type was first released in 2001. Google wasn't yet the most popular search engine, and there were no such things as AdSense or AdWords. There were no iPods and no Windows XP. No web browsers like Firefox or Safari, and CSS and RSS were both fairly obscure technologies. There was certainly no Web 2.0, which means no great innovations like Flickr or YouTube.

But back then, a lot of us who care about this stuff were a little less cynical, a little more idealistic. We think there's an opportunity to be as wide-eyed and optimistic again, even though we know very well that some corners of the blogosphere can be tough on that kind of thing.

The transformation of the web in the past half-decade didn't turn out to be about technology; it's been a story of people transforming society, culture, politics, and media through the communications power of tools like blogs. So as we take the wraps off of our biggest release ever, we'll be turning the spotlight on you, the Movable Type community. The next few days and weeks will, yes, talk about features and functionality. But the stories we'll be highlighting will also be showing how transformative blogging can be.

It's easy to forget how powerful these tools are if you're already familiar with them. But most people still don't know, and it's going take all of us working together to teach people about the potential of blogs. We hope you'll help us tell the story, not just of Movable Type, but as a reminder to everyone who doesn't yet know the powerful connections that can be made through blogging.

Thanks to all of you who've made Movable Type and Six Apart a success over the years. We hope you appreciate Movable Type 4 in the spirit it was created: As a platform for sharing your great ideas with the world.

Originally posted by Anil Dash from MovableType.org - Home for the MT Community, on August 14, 2007 10:53 PM

C4[1], the second instance of Jonathan “Wolf” Rentzsch’s excellent conference for indie Mac developers, took place over the weekend in Chicago. Here’s some of what you missed:

Jonathan Rentzsch on the Indie Ethos

What exactly does it mean to be an “indie developer”? Wolf’s definition: working for a non-large company, writing commercial software. But it’s more than that, clearly, and what’s most exciting is that small indie shops — in many cases, one-man shows — are exerting growing influence over the software world.

Wil Shipley on Indie Developer Marketing

The great St. Louis Cardinals pitcher Dizzy Dean said, “It ain’t bragging if you can back it up.” Keep that in mind, and it’s hard to criticize Wil Shipley. His talk on marketing advice for indie Mac developers was engaging, funny, and weird, but what made it great was that it was honest. Yes, Shipley clearly has an enormous ego and he’s not embarrassed to let it show; but he has done it — first as a founder of The Omni Group, and now as the founder of Delicious Monster.

Successful people often tend to be secretive about their strategies — it’s natural to worry about giving too much away to potential rivals and upstarts. Shipley’s ego and confidence in his own talent are such that he has no such qualms; he’s utterly unafraid to tell you exactly what he’s done and why, what works and what doesn’t, to promote and sell Mac software.

Two great lines from his talk. The first regarded attention to detail: “This is all your app is: a collection of tiny details.”

The second regarded how to generate anticipation in advance of a major release. Shipley recommends leaking screenshots, and, near the end, allowing beta testers to start talking about the app publicly. But, as for the app itself: “Don’t announce until it can be downloaded. Don’t let it be downloaded until it can be bought.”

If you think about it, this is very much in line with the promotional strategy for blockbuster movies: show tantalizing shots in advance, try to get people talking about it, but don’t let people see the movie itself until they can pay for it.

He also had a brief demo of the still-in-development Delicious Library 2.0. Very impressive.

Daniel Jalkut on Acquiring Applications

Jalkut had the idea earlier this year to see if anyone wanted to sell him their app. He’s since acquired two for his Red Sweater Software: Black Ink (a crossword puzzle app) and MarsEdit.

Jalkut’s point was very simple: developers tend to think that “acquisitions” are something done by “business people”, suits making deals on golf courses and the like. In a show of hands, only a handful of the 150 or so attendees admitted to ever having bought or sold the rights to a software product. But if you’re developing and selling commercial software, you’re a business person, too.

There’s a big difference between the sort of talent and work involved in designing and implementing a new app, and what it takes to run a software business with a stable of existing products and a large user base. Developers who are good at the former and bored by the latter might do well to sell their creations and move on to the next new app.

Shawn Morel on Virtualization

Morel works for VMware on Fusion; his talk presented an engaging, approachable overview of how Fusion works. Ultimately, though, the feature the audience wanted most was one VMware can’t provide without permission from Apple: virtualizing Mac OS X itself. (Imagine the advantage to developers for QA testing to be able to run multiple versions of Mac OS X on the same machine without rebooting.)

Allan Odgaard on TextMate

Interesting background on why he chose to create TextMate, and what informed his design decisions. Best line: “TextMate is a platform on which bundles are the software.” What’s interesting about that is that Odgaard admitted that this wasn’t how he envisioned TextMate at the outset; the idea of bundles came much later, but now they’re the core appeal of the product, and he’s embracing that in his work on the upcoming TextMate 2.

Bobby Andersen on Icon Design

Bobby Andersen, the 19-year-old wunderkind iconographer behind the newly-founded (and well-named) Pixel Implosion, held a short session showing how he created this icon for QLab. (Short answer: Cinema 4D and a lot of work.) I find iconography to be one of the most fascinating aspects of this entire racket; it requires the confluence of branding, illustration, user interface design, and pixel wrangling. It’s just plain fun to watch icon jockeys work.

Bob Ippolito on Erlang

Erlang is a very interesting programming language that, thanks to Ippolito’s overview, I’m now pretty certain I will never use myself.

Adam Engst on Hacking the Press

Engst, who’s been editing, publishing, and writing for TidBITS for 17 years, previously gave talks at the old MacHack conference on how indie developers can better deal with the press. His talk at C4[1] was in some ways the reciprocal of Shipley’s. The point of both is simply this: How do you get attention paid to your work?

I found myself in agreement with nearly everything Engst advised. One nugget that stood out in particular was his admonition regarding how to write a press release; namely, look at the press releases from successful companies like Apple and just copy the format exactly. There’s a simple formula, and your press release is the one place where you do not want to be creative. I’m amazed at how many bad press releases I get each week, where by “bad”, I mean ones where I read the first paragraph and still don’t know what exactly is being announced.

The biggest shame of the conference is that the Q&A session after Engst’s talk was cut for scheduling reasons; I got the sense that the audience had a lot of questions.

Tim Burks on RubyObjC and Nu

There are two separate bridges between Ruby and Objective-C: RubyCocoa and RubyObjC. Burks wrote most of the documentation available for RubyCocoa, and then went on to create RubyObjC as an alternative. His talk was both technical and yet somehow very personal; there’s something riveting about a man driven to forge his own advanced tools. There was a wonderful narrative flow to Burks’s talk; as Buzz Andersen twittered:

Tim Burks is my kind of geek — peppering his RubyObjC programming language talk with historical/biblical allusions and metaphors.

Burks’s talk concluded in a way that was both unexpected (because the talk was billed as being about Ruby bridges) and yet somehow inevitable: he’s written a new bridge, Nu, which he describes as, “a new programming language that binds the expressive power of Lisp to the pervasiveness and machine-level efficiency of C by building on the power and flexibility of Objective-C”.

It was a beautiful talk, and Nu looks like a beautiful language.

Speaking of Twitter

Alex Payne from Twitter was in attendance, and he set up a special C4 Twitter “back channel”. Anyone following the “c4” Twitter account during the course of the conference received all tweets directed to that account. Simple, easy way for the audience to chatter in a way that was distracting to neither fellow audience members nor the speakers. I thought it was a grand success.

Cabel Sasser on Panic and Coda

Sunday morning’s opener, and my favorite session, hands down. Hilarious, informative, insightful, inspiring. Sasser described the origins of Panic — he and Steven Frank writing Mac software on nights and weekends out of a shared apartment in the late ’90s. He described the thinking behind Coda, their newest and most ambitious project to date. He showed his UI design prototyping technique based on Photoshop layers, with each feature in a layer and related features grouped into folders. He talked about resolution independence, and how and why Panic made Coda the Mac’s first resolution-independent app. (It looks damn good zoomed in.)

My favorite part was a bit about Coda’s toolbar. Sasser had a specific idea in mind regarding how to visually indicate which tool is currently selected; the problem is that it required the app to draw all the way to the bottom of the toolbar, but there’s a limitation in Cocoa’s NSToolbar that prevents an app from drawing in the bottom three pixels.

Three pixels. And, despite many attempts, they found no way to work around it. So, two options: give up and compromise, or start from scratch and write their own Cocoa toolbar from the ground up.

They wrote their own.

Just three measly pixels, but there was no other way to make it look just right. The decision exemplifies what makes Panic, to my eyes, the most Apple-like indie Mac developers.

Iron Coder Live

Lots of clever hacks — including Craig Hockenberry’s web app graphing calculator for iPhones and Rosyna’s insane animated menu backgrounds for Mac OS X — but the three I voted for (everyone cast a ballot for their favorite three) were the three that won: Glen and Ken Aspeslagh’s two-way videoconferencing iPhone app, Lucas Newman’s Lights Off game for the iPhone, and Dave Dribin’s The Bouncer, a Dock icon bouncing hack that Dribin demoed beautifully.

Drunkenbatman’s Panel Discussion

For the last session on Saturday, “Drunkenbatman”, as he did at last year’s C4[0] and at his own “Evening at Adler” event before that, led a panel discussion. This year’s panel was mostly comprised of the speakers from the other sessions at C4[1].

There were three main topics. The first regarded Pzizz, a Mac OS X nap timer with some scammy marketing behind it. The third topic regarded the state of open source on the Mac. Neither topic seemed relevant to the panelists nor seemed to hold the interest of the audience.

Drunkenbatman’s second topic, however, was incendiary. It began with this slide and statement: “Black People Don’t Use Macs”.

There’s a fine line between a moderator challenging his panelists (good) and ambushing them (bad). This came across as the latter; an unanswerable “Do you still beat your wife?” question.

Several panelists and audience members disputed Drunkenbatman’s basic premise. One audience member spoke up with his observation that at Macworld Expo, the largest gathering of Mac users in the U.S., there are plenty of black people. Drunkenbatman responded by turning up the hyperbole. As I transcribed it in my notebook, he said: “The only black people at Macworld are outside begging for change.”

Racial diversity is a legitimate and important topic (although I question whether it was a good topic for this panel at this conference). Some truths are uncomfortable, and the only way to get at them is through uncomfortable discussions. Drunkenbatman’s “begging for change” statement, however, was neither true nor simply a controversial opinion. It was stupid.

It was an exaggeration intended to emphasize his implied thesis, which is that black people, in general, are under-represented in the Mac community compared to the communities surrounding other OS platforms. I don’t know whether that’s true; I hope it’s not, but I don’t know. When opinions run as hot as they can regarding an issue such as racial diversity, it’s essential to argue with as many facts as possible — and but alas, Drunkenbatman had no numbers to cite.

It was a mistake the discussion never recovered from. Audience reaction ranged from offended to embarrassed (and, by the end, bored). Much like a train, once a discussion like this falls off the rails, it doesn’t come back.

Originally posted by John Gruber from Daring Fireball, on August 14, 2007 9:55 PM

I'm posting over at Vox, now.

Originally posted by Benjamin Trott from Stupidfool.org, on August 14, 2007 8:07 PM

I hadn't gone to Sweet Melissa's in a long time when i wandered into Melissa Murphy's newest location in Park Slope. I had to have the butterscotch pudding, which still sets the standard for butterscotch pudding in this city. It's creamy, light, and refreshingly unsweet. The chocolate cookies were mighty fine, and the sour cherry clafouti is a deceptively buttery and tart delight that demands to be eaten by hand. And though most cupcakes leave me cold, Melissa's peanut butter cream chocolate cupcakes almost make me a cupcake convert. She is also a serious pie baker. In fact, Sweet Melissa's is a remarkably consistent bakery. And in a world awash in maddeningly inconsistent bakeries, that consistency is most welcome.

Sweet Melissa's
276 Court Street (at Douglass)
Brooklyn, NY 11231
Ph: 718-855-3410

Other locations:
175 Seventh Avenue (1st and 2nd Sts.)
Brooklyn, NY 11215
Ph: 718-502-9153

296 Bond St. (Sackett)--Baking Headquarters
Brooklyn, NY 11231
No phone

Originally posted by Ed Levine from Serious Eats: Main, on August 14, 2007 6:42 PM

Posted by M T Raghunath and Gokul Nath Babu Manoharan, Software Engineers

Happy 60th birthday, India! We can't wait to celebrate, but we're going to wait a few days for the formal unwrapping of our gift to Indian users. Check back and we'll have news shortly.

Originally posted by Karen from Official Google Blog, on August 14, 2007 6:08 PM

Sam Ruby: “just like the web encompasses both the human web and programmable web, we need a messaging infrastructure that is not only human friendly but also bot friendly”.

This is exactly what we were getting at with Social Software for Robots

Originally posted by kellan from Laughing Meme, on August 14, 2007 5:33 PM

Phil Rizzuto was one of the best-loved local sports personalities of all time. There's no doubt about that. Most of the commentary flowing around the blogosphere consists of tributes to Rizzuto as a person and as a TV personality....

Originally posted by Rob Gebeloff from NJ.com: Stat Attack, on August 14, 2007 5:10 PM

First it was watermelons; now our strawberries aren't safe from anthropomorphization. One day Randy found a mad face staring at him after biting into a strawberry. What's the next step in strawberry evolution?

Originally posted by Robyn Lee from Serious Eats: Main, on August 14, 2007 2:35 PM

OK - I had a great time at C4, and I would like to write an extensive blog post about all the great, and some of the slightly awkward things that happened at the conference. I would like to, but I’m incredibly busy. Almost too busy to write anything at all. Except I want to help stand up against a growing tide of inaccurate commentary about the deeds of DrunkenBatman at the conference.

Here’s what happened:

DrunkenBatman used his role as moderator of a group panel to explore some theories that did not meet with universal agreement from the audience. The topics were explored longer than they should have been, and some of the ideas were presented in a provocative fashion. The audience and panel were both generally pretty dissatisfied with the resulting lack of meaningful discussion that transpired.

One of the ideas DrunkenBatman tried to convey was that the Mac market might not be as diverse as other platforms, particularly Linux. His theory was that by improving the diversity of the platform, it would lead to a greater atmosphere for future product development, and be a particular boon to the open source movement on the Mac.

In the course of presenting these ideas he filled the screen with one particularly provocative slide, which read “Black People Don’t Use Macs.” He then employed some statistically inappropriate anecdotes, and took an informal poll in our room of 150 Mac developers, where only person raised his hand, self-identifying as black. While he didn’t particularly convince the audience or panel that his theory was accurate, at least we understood where he was coming from in his speculation.

DrunkenBatman did not do a great job making his points on Saturday evening, or of managing the panel he was supposed to be moderating, but that does not make him a racist. Conference attendee Ian Baird snapped a photo of the aforementioned slide, and posted it to his Flickr account, where it received a fair amount of misguided and inappropriate venom. I trust that Ian was not trying to encourage accusations of racism - he was just posting an interesting snapshot from the conference.

But today some idiot on Digg (is that an oxymoron?) took it upon himself to post a link to the Flickr photo, with the extremely inappropriate caption “DrunkenBatman goes on racist tirade at C4 Mac dev conference.” This gets my blood boiling, because although there were aspects of DrunkenBatman’s overall presentation that bordered on tirade status, his comments regarding diversity among Mac users were by no means racist. It’s offensive and slanderous of Digg user AmazingSyco to imply that they were.

If you were at C4, or even if you weren’t but trust my description of how things went down, I would urge you to help bury the story on Digg. The way this works is you log in as a registered Digg user and “Bury” the story with a rationale. If enough people do it, the story disappears from searches and from the popular stories pages.

It won’t undo the damage of the slanderous statement, but at least it will help prevent it spreading wider or faster than it should. I rarely believe that stories should be buried, but in this case the caption and associated commentary are so hurtful and inaccurate, I believe it’s the right thing to do.

Thanks for listening, and I hope to have a less adrenaline-inspired post about C4 at some point in the near future.

Originally posted by Daniel Jalkut from Red Sweater Blog, on August 14, 2007 2:34 PM

August 14, 2007 -2:59 p.m. - Burbank, CA Today's my birthday! It was awesome getting SNS posts, tweets, text messages, IM's, e-cards, phone calls, voice mails, and emails all day. I even had a few snail mail cards waiting for...

Originally posted by souris from hustler of culture, on August 14, 2007 1:59 PM

Over lunch, a Serious Eats colleague told me about the opening of Accademia di Vino.

"What's that? Some kinda wine bar? Not interested," I said.

"But it's got grilled pizza," she said.

"Well, why diddincha say so?"

One of the dudes behind this place—executive chef Kevin Garcia—came up through Al Forno, my colleague said, where he worked as something called a tournant, or a roundsman. Al Forno is, of course, the grilled-pizza mothership—the joint in Providence, Rhode Island, where George Germon came up the idea of slapping pizza dough on a grate over coals. Mr. Garcia also did a turn under the late Vinny Scotto at New York City's Gonzo, the place credited with bringing grilled pizza to the Big Apple. (Mr. Scotto himself learned the art of the grilled pie at Al Forno.)

Accademia di Vino, will open to the public tomorrow night (August 15) in the old Mainland space at 1081 Third Avenue, on the Upper East Side, at 64th Street.

So, lo and behold, we get back from throwing down some slices (what else did you think I'd be eating?), and there's a flack attack in my inbox. I'll let it do all the non-intriguing non-pizza talking, after the jump.

“Accademia di Vino”, which translates to an academy made of wine, holds a deliberate double-pun, reflecting the integral part that wine plays in the design and menu of this venture. Accademia di Vino will feature a comprehensive collection of over 500 Italian wines offered by the bottle (from $28 and up) and an extensive wine by the glass program (from $8 to $25). The menu will offer an extensive journey through contemporary and traditional Italian cuisine. Antipasti, salumi, and pasta (from $9 - $16); main courses (from $18 to $30); and, desserts (from $7 to $10) will create numerous options for ways to enjoy a simple snack through a full course tasting dinner. The additional flourish of Kevin Garcia’s specialty Grilled Pizza (from $15 to $18) will certainly confirm Accademia di Vino as one of the most exciting new dining destinations in New York, and on the Upper East Side.

Accademia di Vino

Address: 1081 Third Avenue at 64th Street, New York NY 10021 (Upper East Side; map)
Phone: 212-888-6333
URL: accademiadivino.com

Originally posted by Adam Kuban from Serious Eats: Main, on August 14, 2007 12:00 PM

So, I decided since the boy is now a year old, I need to take back my body.
I started a few weeks back, running and walking around the HS track in my hood and I managed to drop a few pounds.

However, I wonder, how will I ever get rid of this excess skin? My muscles are under there, and I can feel them, but the skin is just droopy. I started looking at other "mommy tummies" and without fail, if a woman has has at least two kids, she can get all the skinny she wants but the belly ain't going away.

Has anyone seen this new show about a woman who had twins and then septuplets??? Yes, you read that right. She showed us her tummy and it looked like the face of my brother in law's bulldog.
I kid you not.

She got that belly all nipped and tucked for free, on account that a plastic surgeon felt bad for her. Do you think I can get one to feel bad for me? I mean, my "belly button" now needs to be cleaned out weekly and once I found one of Jake's missing socks in there!

So, anyway, also besides the running I am cutting out sugar and trying to eat healthy, only today I am not
feeling well so lucky charms for breakfast, OJ all day long and a big heaping bowl of pasta are not helping me, but after today I am going to post about my "mom challenge" and let you know how I am doing. I may even post pix of my belly so you can see that it indeed never goes down.

Wish me luck!

Originally posted by nyjenn2074 from Mommyblog, on August 14, 2007 10:42 AM

Today we are excited to announce the official release of a brand new and completely redesigned Movable Type Plugin Directory. This new directory is a resource designed and developed by and for the community.

The Directory is powered completely by Movable Type 4.0 enabling us to build a site that contains a number new features and enhancements its predecessor never had:

• local authentication and registration to make it easier for developers to manage their contributions
  
• customizable screenshot slideshows for users to more easily preview a plugin's functionality
  
• ratings to help the community inform one another about what is most popular and most recommended
  
• reviews and comments allowing users to leave feedback to the author of the plugin
  
• tags to assist visitors in navigation and discovery of plugins
  
• restructured category hierarchy for a simplified and more organized directory

Login or create an account now!

It really is a whole new world for Movable Type: there's a new product, a new web site, a new plugin directory and a bunch of new plugins that work with MT4... and believe it or not, we are still just getting started. The coming weeks and months still have a lot in store for the community. Stay tuned!

Originally posted by Byrne Reese from MovableType.org - Home for the MT Community, on August 14, 2007 9:59 AM

As experience design consultants, we love having the opportunity to tackle lots of different kinds of problems. But we don’t always get to try out all the problems that interest us the most — after all, we can only solve those problems somebody has seen fit to devote some money to solving, and then shown the good judgment to hire us to take them on. So we decided to go hunting for problems nobody’s asked us to solve yet.

Then blogger Amy Tenderich posted her “Open Letter to Steve Jobs” in April, pleading with the Apple CEO to apply some of that company’s design expertise to improving the lives of the 20 million American diabetics who rely on technology to manage their condition every day. Amy’s blog post got a lot of attention, even making its way to TechCrunch. Amy asked for better products for diabetics, but we recognized that those products had to add up to an experience that would satisfy their emotional and psychological needs. So we set out to develop an experience design concept that addressed user behavior and psychology as well as current technological trends to project how insulin pumps and glucose meters might work five years from now.

We spent time with diabetics, who showed us their routines and talked about how hard it can be to stay motivated to keep themselves healthy. They shared their experiences with the technology products that they literally depend on for their lives. With their insights, we were able to formulate a set of design goals we’d have to meet in order to transform the experience of managing diabetes. We came up with dozens and dozens of possible design concepts, sketching out different approaches to achieving those goals. Out of those concepts, a few key elements started to fall into place. We looked at the solutions out on the market and talked to diabetes educators about what works for people and what doesn’t.

We built on those concepts by fleshing out the interaction design of the product, mapping out how the users would monitor their condition and give themselves insulin. At this point, it became clear that a bunch of interface mockups wouldn’t be enough to convey our ideas. That’s when we started producing this video.

The video doesn’t stand alone. We’ve provided all the background on the thinking behind the Charmr concept, including our research findings, as part of our case study. It’s been an exciting project that has pushed us in unexpected ways — in other words, just the kind of project we had hoped for. We look forward to doing more of them!

High quality video of Charmr

Movie Credits:

Sushi: http://www.flickr.com/photos/purpleslog/233433951/
Doctor’s Office: http://flickr.com/photos/sbconsci/361586238/
College: http://flickr.com/photos/genvessel/110114471/
Background of Charmr: http://flickr.com/photos/post/19350897/

Music: Andrew Crow

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Originally posted by Jesse James Garrett from Adaptive Path, on August 14, 2007 9:40 AM

After research, it was time to begin coming up with concepts for what it was we were actually going to design. From the research, we came up with six primary design principles:

• Wear it during sex. Make the product elegant, discreet, and comfortable.
• Make better use of data. Have the product use the data that is generated (blood glucose levels, amount of insulin dosed, trends) in smarter ways.
• Easy to learn and teach/No numbers. A broad cross-section of diabetics will use this product, so it cannot be overly complicated, nor difficult to teach. And while numbers are important, we didn’t want to solely rely on those for indicating status and trending.
• Less stuff. Diabetics have to carry around a lot of stuff. We wanted to be sure that whatever we created wasn’t just one more thing to carry around.
• Keep diabetics in control. The people we spoke to weren’t interested in automatic pumps for the most part. They wanted to retain control of their insulin dosing.
• Keep diabetics motivated. Diabetes is a difficult disease to have. Diabetics, in the words of someone we talked to, “never get a day off,” so keeping motivated is a challenge. We wanted our product to help diabetics set goals and be so easy to use it helped keep them on track.

We also observed five major activities that all diabetics have to perform: maintaining equipment, checking blood glucose levels, interpreting those results, adjusting their blood glucose, and keeping motivated. (See our Diabetes Alignment Diagram [48k pdf]).

We started brainstorming around these core sets of principles and activities, first with just our small team, then in an open design session with about half of Adaptive Path participating.

After several brainstorming sessions, we had about 100 different concepts, all pasted up in our project space.

We had to make some hard decisions: would what we were going to design work with people who used syringes? (No.) How far into the future did we want to design for? (Two-three years.) What part of diabetes management could we reasonably affect? (We focused primarily on the day-to-day diabetes management, not on things like long-term care and diabetics’ relationship to doctors and to the health care system.) Was it going to be one object? Two? Three? (Two, as it turned out: a pump/monitor and a controller.)

We spent a lot of time discussing how the best of these ideas (because, frankly, some were unworkable or loony or had been done before) could fit together into one system that would really address the needs of diabetics as we’d heard them. It was Rachel Hinman who finally came up with the idea of what we’d eventually call The Charmr. “There should be just this little thing you can carry around that controls the pump/monitor and it should be like a piece of jewelry or something,” she said one afternoon when we were all exhausted from thinking about this problem for weeks on end.

The moment she said it, the room came alive. “A piece of jewelry with a touchscreen!” “Get a piece of foamcore!” “How big could it be?” “How much would it weigh?” “Anyone have an iPod Shuffle to compare?” And on it went until we had a concept we all loved, and the more we thought of it, the more we loved it. “It’s like a mood ring for your condition,” Rachel said. We wore the physical prototype around and started to call it Charmr (dropping the E in a joking homage to Web 2.0 companies) because it was like a charm bracelet and it worked like a charm (we hoped).

Several days later, Alexa Andrzejewski and I sat down with a blank whiteboard and said, “Ok, now that we’ve picked this concept, how does the Charmr really work?” That’s the next story to tell.

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Originally posted by Dan from Adaptive Path, on August 14, 2007 9:37 AM

Five years ago yesterday, I started Daring Fireball. Things change fast: the first article was on the just-released-that-day dual 1.25 GHz Power Mac G4s; most Mac users, and most DF readers, were still on Mac OS 9; DF had no Linked List and didn’t offer any RSS feeds. It took me a few months to find my voice, but the early entries aren’t too bad.

#

Originally posted by John Gruber from Daring Fireball, on August 14, 2007 9:04 AM

Updating a story from last week, we talked to Rob Kaufelt, proprietor of Murray's Cheese, for some more details on the deal they struck with The Kroger Company to help expand the grocery chain's specialty cheese selections. Needless to say, we think the following exchange will provide some real excitement for cheese lovers in the Midwest.

What exactly will you be doing to help Kroger expand their specialty cheese selection?
We will be setting up Murray's shops with cheeses selected by Murray's, operated by Kroger. We will know more as we progress.

Will all the Kroger stores be expanding their cheese selections, or only certain key stores in certain markets?
It depends. If the tests are successful, then we'll add more stores as both companies see fit.

Which cheeses will you and Kroger be focusing on? For example, more Gruyère than Epoisses?
It's really too soon to say, but we don't distinguish between the two cheeses cited here, anyway.

Will the cheeses be marketed as "Murray's" cheeses in the Kroger stores?
The shops are Murray's, and will look much like the ones here in New York City, including those things that are distinctly ours. Our goal is for customers to feel like they're walking into a mini Murray's Cheese, wherever they may be. It's not about a brand on a label, it's about the Murray's experience.

What does this mean for the specialty cheese industry in the U.S.? Do you see this as part of a larger trend?
We certainly hope so. Good cheese should be as readily available in America as it is in Europe.

About the author: Jamie Forrest publishes Curdnerds.com from his apartment in Brooklyn, New York, where he lives with his wife, his daughter, and his cheese.

Originally posted by Jamie Forrest from Serious Eats: Main, on August 14, 2007 8:45 AM

appropriately answered by a former GA researcher, now answering on UClue  

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Waxy.org Links, on August 14, 2007 8:42 AM

On "Blackle," the all-black homepage that purported to save energy, the Google blog says "...on flat-panel monitors (already estimated to be 75% of the market), displaying black may actually increase energy usage." Just goes to show, the crowd is still dumb. How many people jumped at this meme? More at The Numbers Guy and earth2teach. Earth2tech, "a publication devoted to intersection between the tech industry, their eco-moves and the next generation of tech innovation that will combat climate change" looks promising.

Originally posted by David Jacobs from hello, typepad, on August 14, 2007 8:13 AM

On "Blackle," the all-black homepage that purported to save energy, the Google blog says "...on flat-panel monitors (already estimated to be 75% of the market), displaying black may actually increase energy usage."

Just goes to show, the crowd is still dumb. How many people jumped at this meme?

More at The Numbers Guy and earth2tech. Earth2tech, "a publication devoted to intersection between the tech industry, their eco-moves and the next generation of tech innovation that will combat climate change" looks promising.

Originally posted by David Jacobs from hello, typepad, on August 14, 2007 8:13 AM

1,700 vintage game manuals as watermark-free PDFs  

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Waxy.org Links, on August 14, 2007 7:52 AM

Ladies and gents, the always opinionated DJ Bubbles has checked in once again. Because I never know when he's going to strike, I'd been unofficially calling his stunning dispatches "drive-bys." Now I'm formalizing it. Here's the DJ Bubbles Drive-By on Isabella's Oven. It's a must-read, so do click through the jump. —Adam

Words by DJ Bubbles | It has been said before that having a great meal can be a transcendent experience. When someone has poured all his soul, energy, and being into something so divine, you can taste it in every bite. It isn't something that happens all that often in these times, but when it does, you don't soon forget it. To say that I had one of these experiences this Saturday may be true—I'm still not sure. How is that possible, you ask? That's a good question, and all I know is it happened on my second trip to Isabella's Oven after a very mediocre first visit. The difference in pie quality was immediately apparent after I had my first slice of an individual Margherita while sitting on Isabella's outdoor patio. However, the questions regarding this newbie's consistency linger, and I have to ask myself—was this past Saturday the beginning of a beautiful friendship or a flash in the pan, mere pizza fool's gold?

My first visit was prompted by a recent posting on Slice from everyone's favorite foodie, Ted Levine. After his glowing review, I had no choice but to make a sojourn of my own two Sundays ago and see for myself because, after all, you can't always take Ted's word at face value. Besides, I like doing my own homework even though these assignments aren't exactly cake (they're pie!). So on I went to Isabella's on this warm Sunday evening round about 8 p.m. One would think good ol' Luigi (their Neapolitan pizzaiolo—great guy) and his trusty brick oven would be warmed up by then and slinging out top notch apizz. Wrong. What is it with putting together a legit Margherita D.O.C. these days? Luzzo's and No. 28 have had their troubles as of late, too. At any rate, I had a pie with an identity crisis. Luigi seemed to want to stick to his Naples roots and make a 'wet' pie, but he seemed to forget the cardinal rule with respect as to why it should be wet in the first place—a good amount of sauce, not olive oil. I love my Margheritas finished with olio d'oliva, but to do so takes a degree of subtlety, not a heavy hand. And why skimp on the sauce? With a terrific blend of sweet, fresh tomatoes that had a nice acidic aftertaste, there's just no excuse to go light in that department. After all, the benchmark of a pizzeria should be its Margherita, not a damn white pie! Not only that, but when you pay $6 extra for a D.O.C. instead of a regular Margherita, the bufala mozzarella better come correct. Let's just say it also was not on point—no tang, no bang, you dig? I left the restaurant that night feeling confused, slighted, and worried about Captain Levine's ability to spot The Next Great Pie of New York.

I left my apartment this past Saturday afternoon thinking I was going to make a pizza pilgrimage to one of the Brooklyn behemoths. Maybe Di Fara, L&B—or I might finally give Lucali's a try.

For whatever reason, I decided against it and, instead, made my way downtown. I first hit up L'asso (also for the second time in a week) and decided that'd be the last time I'd frequent this establishment for some time to come. Talk about a pretender. It's great to have a big brick oven in the middle of your open kitchen, but if you are going to top your Margherita slices with a sauce that bad and a crust that tastes like burnt toast, donate it to a pie man who isn't going to let oregano (oregano!) overpower every bite you take. I needed relief, my friends. I decided that I should give Isabella's (and Ted Levine, for that matter) one more try before I lit it up on Slice for the whole world to read (or maybe just us diehard pieheads).

The Margherita: Isabella's regular Margherita is a non-D.O.C. pie with fresh mozzarella, plenty of sauce, and fresh basil that's picked—when in season—from plants growing on the joint's patio. Shown here is a large pie from Slice editor Adam Kuban's visit on July 27, 2007.

As I alluded to before, Luigi & Co. simply knocked my socks off with something as simple as Isabella's regular Margherita. Fresh mozz that, although it didn't have the tart or tang of bufala, had all the creamy and buttery goodness you could ask for coming from cow's milk and provided the perfect contrast to that primo sauce that I spoke of before—only this time there was more of it.

What got me, though, was the crust—I've never had better in all my days as a pizzameister (it's going on 29 years, folks), and it simply melted in my mouth. When people say pizza melts in your mouth, they're usually wrong, because that means that it has to have an agreeable crust. You need a crust that you don't have to struggle with, or bite into too hard, a crust that you don't have to chew too many times before it can be comfortably swallowed. Most important, you need a crust that you would never think of setting aside on the pan after you've eaten the "body" of the slice. I know, I'm getting hot, too, just thinking about it! And because I like to do my homework, I went out the next night to compare this masterpiece with one of my more reliable bellweathers, Nick's, and I came away feeling vindicated. Nick's is no slouch, but it's no Isabella's, either. The Isabella's of this past Saturday, that is. I guess one of the lessons we can take away from my ongoing adventures in Slicedom is that we should never expect our favorite pizzaioli to be perfect all of the time but, when they are, it can be that rare transcendental experience.

Extra Cheese

Isabella's Oven, One Great Pizza on a Saturday Night [Slice]
Isabella's Oven photo set [Slice's Flickr photo archives]

Originally posted by Adam Kuban from Serious Eats: Main, on August 14, 2007 7:30 AM

Sometimes corporate blogging can feel so forced. Unless someone at a company has a passion or a CEO or senior exec uses the blog to slip the leash of corporate communicatons, a blog created by a company can sometimes feel like a forgotten child. But it feels like to me Kodak has hit on a fresh and clever way to approach blogging.

The company launched the first blog, A Thousand Words, about a year ago. The idea, explains David Kassnoff, a manager of corporate communications, was to "give a human face to an iconic company that was often viewed as a “film company,” even though our digital revenues exceed our film revenues." If you comb through the blog, which is written by employees, you'll see some just reallly fun, personable quirky entries, including a recent one about attending last weekend's Nascar race in Watkins Glen. (Great photos and a video. And I didn't realize that they paint the headlights on the cars, since they aren't needed but the cars look funny without them)

Then in January, Kodak launched a technology blog called A Thousand Nerds, as a place where Kodak's geeks share ideas. There's true geekery here, like a post on quantum amplication. Of then, of course, there's posts of geeks gone wild. Just check out the post about the home-made rocket propelled disposable video camera that's launched in a soda bottle. (My husband would love this site).

The blogs are low key, but I think that's what's clever about them. By a lot of people contributing posts, you get a sense of the people at Kodak. And that gives you a sense of the company. The posts are earnest and funny and technical and full of photos. I doubt the site is overwhelmed with traffic, but if you're someone who is visiting the kodak site looking for information, it's probably likely that you would click on these blogs. And just like the About link or the History link, they give you a feeling for the company you're doing business with.

Originally posted by heather_green from BusinessWeek Online - Blogspotting, on August 14, 2007 6:46 AM

After managing to miss the first couple of installments due to my own incompetence with the big red button on the TiVo remote, I finally got a chance to check out the latest run of No Reservations, which is billed as "Season 3, Part Deux." Having watched the previous seasons pretty much in their entirety, it was just like returning to a well-worn vinyl chair at the kitchen table of an old friend, albeit an old friend who you are incredibly envious of. I mean, why does this mook get to travel to the world's great cities, get whisked instantly to the best local spots by eager, attractive foodies, all the while having no apparent raison d'etre beyond getting smashed on free booze in every country on Earth? Is it because he's a great writer and a one-of-kind personality who it's very difficult not to like? Oh. Yeah, I guess that's it.

In last night's episode, Tony takes on São Paulo, Brazil—otherwise known as "not Rio de Janeiro." In fact, Bourdain goes to great lengths to detail how São Paulo and its inhabitants, known as Paulistas, differ from the beach lovers of Rio. The first segment centered on the supremacy of the Mortadella sandwich, which owes its popularity in São Paulo to the large number of Italians who settled in that region of the country.

After the obligatory Samba segment and some ruminations on the proximity of rich to poor (and a thrilling helicopter ride), Bourdain settled in to do what he does best—eat and get hammered. It really was a tough call as to which delicacy took top honors on last night's show—the national drink, the caipirinha, or the national dish, feijoado. They both had a Pavlovian effect on this viewer. In the end, I suppose the winner was probably the feijoado, since the resulting hangover appeared to be easier to manage.

Originally posted by Harold Check from Serious Eats: Main, on August 14, 2007 5:40 AM

What I thought I heard on the radio this morning:

"Claude Rains caused last week's subway shutdowns."

Originally posted by (author unknown) from kshay.com, on August 14, 2007 4:40 AM

Bon Appétit magazine's three finalists for the best burgers in America are:

• The green chile cheeseburger at: Bobcat Bite, 420 Old Las Vegas Highway, Santa Fe NM 87505; 505-983-5319
• The bacon cheeseburger at: Taylor's Automatic Refresher, 933 Main Street, Helena CA 94574; 707-963-3486
• The Meerscheeseburger at The Meers Store and Restaurant, 26005 State Highway 115, Lawton OK 73501; 580-429-8051

When I asked Bon Appétit's Andrew Knowlton about the criteria and methodology the magazine's editors used in selecting the three finalists, he gave a Solomaic answer.

"Of course our selections are subjective and open to debate. But I can tell you that anybody who eats at any of the three finalists in any category will not be disappointed with the food itself or the people and the stories behind the food."

What's interesting about the magazine's selections is that there is very little overlap with all the other best burger lists by such fine taste-budded writers like Alan Richman (in GQ) and Ray Sokolov in the Wall Street Journal. There are more best burger lists from some noted burger lovers here on AHT.

The Bobcat Bite is number 12 on Richman's list and doesn't appear at all on Sokolov's. Meers General Store and Taylor's Refresher are nowhere to be found on their lists, and I'd be willing to bet 25 Shake Shack burgers that Richman and Sokolov have been to Taylor's, given the fact they are both experienced food and wine geeks who know their way around the Napa Valley, where Taylor's is located.

Richman's top three are the Not Just a Burger at the Spiced Pear Restaurant at the Chanler Hotel in Newport, Rhode Island, the Luger Burger at Peter Luger in Brooklyn, and the Sirloin Burger at Le Tub in Hollywood, Florida.

Sokolov's top three are not readily apparent from reading his story, but reading between the patties, I would say his four favorite burgers are at the Apple Pan in Los Angeles and surprisingly, a trio in Atlanta: the bacon cheeseburger at the Earl in East Atlanta, the burger at the Vortex, and the Ghetto Burger at Ann's Snack Bar.

So what can we conclude? The most beautiful, best burgers are in the eyes of the burger holder. My three favorites change on any given day, but today I would give the nod to the Apple Pan, the Spotted Pig in New York City's Greenwich Village, and Telepan, also in New York. On other days I would mention Resto (Manhattan), the Good Fork in Red Hook, Brooklyn, and the Red Mill in Seattle. As you can see, my list is dominated by New York burgers.

What does that say? I'm a hometown burger boy, like most people I know. And, as Knowlton said, you will not be disappointed by any of the above-mentioned burgers.

So what are your top three burgers?

Originally posted by Ed Levine from Serious Eats: Main, on August 14, 2007 4:30 AM

Update: VMware rose as much as 90 percent in its first day of trading, valuing the company at over $20 billion. — via Bloomberg.

Tuesday morning is a big moment for VMware and for virtualization technology in general. The company, a spin-off of EMC, will start trading Tuesday morning on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol VMW, and has been priced at $29 per share.

With 33 million shares on offer, VMware plans to raise close to a billion dollars from the public markets. That should value the company at over $10 billion. EMC will still own around 90% of VMware.

VMware had initially planned to raise around $750 million, but the demand for this offering has been strong. The company will spend about $127 million of the total proceeds to buy its headquarters from parent EMC and will also pay another $350 million to EMC to pay off as debt.

Palo Alto-based VMware’s virtualization software reduces energy consumption in data centers, by allowing servers to run more applications on less hardware. VMware says energy cost savings can be $500-600 per server per year.

The potential money saved by cutting down on data center energy consumption could reach $4 billion annually in the U.S., according to a report out earlier this month from the Environmental Protection Agency. Cisco Systems and Intel Corp., are both investors in VMware, indicating their faith in VMware solving some of the current problems of energy consumption being faced by the data center industry.

Originally posted by Katie Fehrenbacher from Earth2Tech, on August 13, 2007 10:49 PM

"Savviness--that quality of being shrewd, practical, well-informed, perceptive, ironic, "with it," and unsentimental in all things political--is, in a sense, their professional religion. They make a cult of it. And it was this cult that Karl Rove understood and exploited for political gain."

Originally posted by Jay Rosen from PressThink, on August 13, 2007 10:48 PM

NAHBS 2008 is set to roll into Portland next February 8-10. I’ve wanted to attend the show that has been in San Jose in recent years. Now that it’s only 200mi away, I have no excuse. Maybe we’ll need to organize a ‘Hugger ride down - our own STP (and back) in February. Fenders would be a must.

Originally posted by Andrew Martin from Bike Hugger, on August 13, 2007 10:30 PM

The alternative energy company that has plans to install hundreds of turbines in the East River to harness tidal energy and generate zero-emission electrical power is running into trouble due to the massive amount of energy they are dealing with. The small number of turbines already placed in the East River by Verdant Power have been temporarily removed as the strong currents continue to overwhelm the physical construction of the underwater "windmills." The six turbines that were placed in the water last December and were capable of supplying 1,000 daily kilowatt hours of power and serving the Gristedes supermarket on Roosevelt Island could not withstand currents. The East River is not actually a river; it's a tidal strait, and one can easily observe the current moving in opposite directions with the tides. Verdant Power's plan is to install a field of turbines anchored to the bottom of the East River and use the currents to generate pollution-free electricity for the city. The currents have proven so strong, however, that the turbine propellers have been sheared off a third of the way down, and stronger replacements were hampered by insufficiently strong bolt connections to the turbine hubs. The New York Times reports that the company is encountering the setbacks with optimism, encouraged that the East River possesses even more power than originally planned for. "'The only way for us to learn is to get the turbines into the water and start breaking them,' said Trey Taylor, the habitually optimistic founder of Verdant Power." Hydro-kinetic power generation is drawing increasing interest. The predictability of tides makes it attractive in a way that wind-powered turbines lack. KeySpan is currently partnering with Verdant Power in its project to install East River turbines and a second company, Oceana Energy, recently secured a federal permit to install turbines further up the East River from Verdant's. Some concern has been expressed about the effect of turbines on aquatic wildlife, but Verdant is funding a close examination of the impact of its turbines on fish and other river species. WNYC interviewed Dean Corren, Verdant Power's Director of Technology Development, in April.

Originally posted by nyc_daveh from Gothamist Weekly Favorites, on August 13, 2007 7:01 PM

Excellent freeware game for iPhone, programmed by Delicious Monster’s Lucas Newman and with artwork by Adam Betts. It’s a perfect game for the iPhone: simple, fun, quick, and a natural fit for a touch screen.

This is not a web app, it’s a real native iPhone app. The good news about that is the experience is better than what any web app running in MobileSafari could possibly provide; the bad news, alas, is that the only way to install it is through the use of unsupported hacks. I played the game on Newman’s iPhone at C4, and it’s worth it. (Lights Off finished second in the Iron Coder contest, behind only Ken and Glen Aspeslagh’s two-way videoconferencing app.)

#

Originally posted by John Gruber from Daring Fireball, on August 13, 2007 5:53 PM

a collection of what seems to be tactical geographical maps used by the US military during the Iraq war. due to the use of short slogan verbs, I am not sure to interpret them as informational maps or just infographic-like encouragement posters to boost soldier morale?

the maps are part of Jenny Holzer collection at the Venice Biennale, which mostly consists of enlarged, painted versions of declassified government & military material obtained from the American National Security Archive. the black strips of censured text on the sensitive material describing issues in Guantánamo Bay, Iraq & Afghanistan merge as a piece of abstract art.

[links: flickr.com & spruethmagers.com|via we-make-money-not-art.com/]

see also military slide design & its redesign.

Originally posted by (author unknown) from information aesthetics, on August 13, 2007 5:53 PM

"You're a piece of work, Charlie Branaski... you try to fly your kite, you play baseball, you drink all night and you're lousy at all of it."

Originally posted by Michal Migurski from tecznotes links, on August 13, 2007 5:19 PM

On the latest "top Chef" fiasco the 'head dude' actually referred to lobster as "high cholesterol..."! I about wanted to throw my shoe at the TV! Lobster is almost virtually FAT-FREE~! It's what you SLATHER on it or DIP it in that makes it FATTY. DUH! Shrimp too...shrimp is pretty much sans fat. I hope ya'll don't mind me ranting here about it...for some reason I just find it ludicrous that a supposed 'chef' had the audacity to call Lobster high in cholesterol.

Originally posted by cheffy from Serious Eats: Main, on August 13, 2007 5:02 PM

The fingers are starting to point in the Newark triple homicide. One big question: How did one of the main suspects, an illegal immigrant with serious criminal charges pending, remain on the streets? Well, for those who will view this...

Originally posted by Rob Gebeloff from NJ.com: Stat Attack, on August 13, 2007 3:04 PM

There's so much buzz about this Sex and the City movie, and as a Carrie & Big fan, I was psyched to hear my boyfriend Chris Noth is reprising his role as Mr. Big. However, with all the rumors swirling, I feared that my favorite suit was going to be... six feet under.

Fear not! According to Michael Patrick King, the show's longtime executive producer, Big is alive and swell.

“There is no need for funeral arrangements” says King. “I assure you that Mr. Big is a very ‘big’ part of the Sex and The City movie. While I have not spoken to him myself, Chris Noth assures me that Mr. Big is alive and well and ready to report to the set in September.”

Yay! So... is it too early to Fandango tickets?

More: Take the TV Playboys Quiz

Originally posted by sbyrne from Daily Blabber, on August 13, 2007 3:02 PM

Hopefully Monday's season opener of Sesame Street will help in sweepin' these clouds away! The new season will begin how it always does, by determining the educational needs of their tv-watching tot demographic. Recent years focused on healthy eating in an effort to help the younger generation befriend veggies (they even have their own line of healthy foods). This year there are 26 new episodes all focusing on early literacy and language skills. USA Today reports on a new segment called "What's the Word on the Street?" which "will feature a Muppet named Murray asking people and animals to define the day's word, which is repeated three times each episode." Check out a clip of this season's celebs asking what the word is, here. Last year's season premiere brought literacy to the kids through Law & Order Special Letters Unit! Maybe this year they'll follow the Bravo reality show recipe with: Project Alphabet. What big names will be stopping by the street this season? Tina Fey kicks it off on Monday with Brian Williams and singer Chris Brown. They're followed by Anderson Cooper (who credits the show for helping him to learn how to read), Rachael Ray, Diane Sawyer, Chad Pennington and even James Blunt (who will likely let everyone on the block know how beautiful they are). Spoiler alert! Monday's word of the day is: squid.

Originally posted by arts_jen from Gothamist Weekly Favorites, on August 13, 2007 2:50 PM

One momentous day Carl wondered what would happen if he sealed a strip of bacon and a raw egg in their own airtight plastic compartments. Two months later the bacon strip transformed into a putrid fat-erupting shell of its former self while the egg's physical appearance stayed the same as the day it was cracked.

Fast forward to a year later and oh, how things have changed. The bacon turned into a semi-translucent slab with patches of fungal matter while the egg broke down into a cloudy honey-colored mass. When nature wants to break down organic matter, it gets the job done.

And now you know what happens when you allow a strip of bacon and a raw egg to rot in airtight containers in the corner of your desk for a year. Remember to refrigerate your food, folks.

Originally posted by Robyn Lee from Serious Eats: Main, on August 13, 2007 1:15 PM

There’s been a lot of hype about the energy-saving powers of Blackle, the all-black site based on Google’s (GOOG) search engine. The site is not, however, affiliated with Google and in fact Bill Weihl, Google’s so-called green energy czar basically shoots holes in Blackle’s raison d’etre:

We applaud the spirit of the idea, but our own analysis as well as that of others shows that making the Google homepage black will not reduce energy consumption. To the contrary, on flat-panel monitors (already estimated to be 75% of the market), displaying black may actually increase energy usage. Detailed results from a new study confirm this — Bill Weihl, Green Energy Czar, Google.

Check out the detailed study Weihl is referring to. Blackle’s Web site says it was made by Heap Media “to remind us all of the need to take small steps in our everyday lives to save energy.” How about the need to get a lot of PR?

Originally posted by Katie Fehrenbacher from Earth2Tech, on August 13, 2007 1:06 PM

Last week's Movable Type 4.0 events were a huge success. On Tuesday we hosted a day long "Upgrade-a-thon" where we invited people to join us in Movable Type's IRC chat room and on the phone to help a number of people with migrating to Movable Type from other platforms as well upgrading older versions of Movable Type to the latest and greatest MT4. Lots of people successfully upgraded that day using the Movable Type 4.0 Upgrade Guide, and many more reported having successfully upgraded earlier on in Movable Type 4.0's beta process.

I would like to thank everyone who participated that day. Your feedback and your many questions allowed us to refine our documentation even further in order to pave the way for even more MT4 converts. Who knew that just by asking questions you would be helping others?

We learned a lot about how to upgrade to MT4. So we thought we'd share it with you.

What follows are some of the most frequently asked questions from that day with links to the documentation that resulted from those questions. If one of your questions was not answered, then please, attach a comment to this post and we will do our best to help you. And don't forget, the #movabletype chatroom is always full of people waiting to help. The docs are the best place to start.

Movable Type 4's all-new documentation is the best place to start if you want to upgrade. If you're not the RTFM type, the key docs you're looking for are:

• Upgrading Movable Type: An outline of what you'll need to do
  
• Works with MT4: Details what plugins work with MT4, along with links to get new versions, if needed
• Upgrading your MT3 Templates to MT4: Most people don't need to touch their templates at all, but if you want to get the most of MT4, here's how
  

I heard that Publish Queue was bundled now, how do I set that up?

Publish Queue (formerly Rebuild Queue) was an extremely popular plugin built on top of Movable Type 3.x. The plugin manages all publishing on a system through a separate daemon process dramatically improving performance, reliability and scalability. We felt that it was so valuable to Movable Type users that we incorporated it into the core engine of MT4.

To help users take advantage of Movable Type's publishing queue capability, we have published a Publish Queue How-To with information on how to use this new feature so that you don't have to wait for pages to publish after you create them.

How do I upgrade my 3.x templates to 4.0 templates?

Movable Type 4.0 has introduced a number of enhancements to its default templates which can help increase the performance associated with publishing pages and entries. It's important to note that your templates from MT 3.x should just work. (The only exception is some templates that use uncommon plugins for template tags.) But lots of you want to transition parts of your sites and templates to take advantage of these enhancements, without having to completely overhaul your blog's HTML. To help you through this process we published a guide to upgrading your site's templates to take advantage of MT4.

Where can I find a page template?

We believe strongly that your site's templates are sacred. As a result MT4 will never modify your templates on its own (except for "System Templates" which are managed by the app itself) during the upgrade process. That means there's no risk of inadvertently disturbing your site's design or functionality. There's one tricky part to following that rule: If you want to use Movable Type 4's new Page feature, you'll need to add a Page Archive template manually. We have made two copies of this template available, depending on whether you're using all the new templates or not:

• Page Template using MT4's Style - this utilizes a number of template modules and includes as well as the HTML and CSS now standard to all MT4 blogs.
  
• Page Template using MT3's Style - this uses a single template with no dependencies on other modules, as well as the HTML and CSS that was standard to older versions of Movable Type.

Is there a list of new template tags for MT4?

Movable Type 4.0 has introduced over 70 new template tags in MT4.0. You can view a complete list of all of Movable Type 4.0's template tags in the appendices of our documentation. New template tags are indicated with a icon.

Where can I find MT4's default templates?

Movable Type 4.0 makes a number of changes to its default templates outlined in our Guide to Upgrading Your Templates. If you want to compare the differences for yourself, take a look at all of the default templates online. In the future we will make alternative versions of these templates available at the same URL.

Where can I find a list of plugins that work with Movable Type 4.0?

Shhh... we haven't officially announced it yet, but we are working on an all-new Movable Type Plugin Directory. Many of our developers have already released updates to existing plugins in addition to creating some new ones that work exclusively with Movable Type 4 (like Bookmarks and Template Shelf).

I am having a hard time getting captchas to work, can you help?

Movable Type 4.0 comes with captcha support built into the core application to help combat comment spam. We have found that a number of users have had difficulty getting this feature to work because some servers are missing a bit of required software. Here's a quick summary of what we've found:  the use of captchas requires Image::Magick to be installed, and captchas specifically require PNG support to be included in your Image::Magick install.

Movable Type is capable of detecting that users have Image::Magick installed, but it can't tell if PNG support is specifically enabled. So, MT will sometimes say that all its prerequisite have been met, when in fact they aren't. We will be updating our documentation with this new information, and look for a way to detect this prerequisite within the application. Sorry for the complexity with this feature on some servers.

Originally posted by Byrne Reese from MovableType.org - Home for the MT Community, on August 13, 2007 12:01 PM

Call me crazy, but I didn’t know that if you heated whole chickpeas they would get crisp and pop. Most of the chickpeas I ingest come all puréed or in deep-fried balls, so I guess I was missing out on this phenomenon.

I pulled this from the The Herbal Kitchen, a gorgeously laid out book about the joys of using herbs in just about everything. I had also thought about chickpeas and parsley, probably because of the hundreds of falafel sandwiches I’ve downed. But the rosemary makes this a much heartier dish. Though definitely not a main course, it is an easy little snack good for those tired of the normal chips and dips. It even tastes good reheated, which you can't say about popcorn. However, like popcorn, it tastes better and better with every additional pinch of salt.

Popcorn Chickpeas

Ingredients

1 15-ounce can of chickpeas
1 tablespoon rosemary, finely chopped
1 clove garlic
3 tablespoons olive oil
Salt and pepper

Procedure

1. Drain the chickpeas and dry off on a paper towel.

2. Heat the olive oil in a skillet over medium high heat. Add the chickpeas. Cook for 5 minutes, shaking occasionally, until darkened.

3. Drain the chickpeas again to get rid of some of the oil. Return the chickpeas back to the empty skillet over medium heat and add the garlic and rosemary. Season with salt and pepper, and plate festively.

Originally posted by Nick Kindelsperger from Serious Eats: Main, on August 13, 2007 11:55 AM

Did you know you can make a salad out of weeds you find in Central Park? Or that there's mushrooms you can gather for free that taste just like chicken? There's plenty that you can find and eat in the city's park system and The Wild Man Steve Brill is just the guy to show you where and how. Gothamist sat down to chat with New York's best known naturalist about the evils of lawns, the effects of global warming, and where to find some delectable free fruit. How did you become The Wildman? After I became interested in food to feed myself, I began to cook and teach cooking professionally, and explore ethnic stores for exotic ingredients and culinary concepts. At that time, I bicycled past a group of ethnic Greek women foraging in a local park. I asked them what they were doing, but it was all Greek to me! However, I came home with a bag of grape leaves, which I stuffed. They were delicious. I began to teach myself foraging, eventually becoming and expert and leading tours. The name “Wildman” came to me during Transcendental Meditation. What did you use to teach yourself foraging? I used books, lots of experimentation, and relentless experimentation in the kitchen once I was sure of my identifications. Was it difficult, at first, to convince people to go on the tours? Yes, sometimes 1 or 2 people would sign up. That all changed after I was arrested. Have your ever accidentally eaten something that wasn't as tasty as you imagined or made you sick? Yes, I grew up on junk food. And an error in a field guide had my try dehydrated skunk cabbage which made my tongue sting for an hour. How do the wild plants compare to their store bought counterparts? The wild American persimmons that grow in Central and Prospect Parks are way sweeter and tastier than the commercial Asian persimmons of supermarkets.

Originally posted by interview_ben from Gothamist Weekly Favorites, on August 13, 2007 11:12 AM

Both the new iMac and the Santa Rosa MacBook Pro have built-in iSight cameras that support a maximum resolution of 1280x1024.

Read More...

Originally posted by iljitsch@gmail.com (Iljitsch van Beijnum) from Infinite Loop, on August 13, 2007 11:03 AM

Paul Greenberg writes:

In case you're interested, I have a couple of pieces in today's Times:

A short food piece in the Times Magazine on small, local salmon operations in Alaska

A back page essay in the Book Review on Ernest Hemingway and his effect on the big pelagic fish like tuna and marlin

There's also an interview with me on the NY Times Book Review's podcast about the Hemingway piece.

Originally posted by David Jacobs from hello, typepad, on August 13, 2007 10:50 AM

Joi's taking great photos lately, like this one: George Lucas and JJ Abrams.

Originally posted by Michael Sippey from (un)filtered, on August 13, 2007 10:12 AM

While we're on the subject of animal abuse, Nike made a big deal of suspending Falcons quarterback Michael Vick after his indictment for an interstate dog fighting operation. It is hard to accept Nike's moral indignation on this point, however, because Nike has previously used dogfighting to give street cred to their brand. You can see Nike's commercial on YouTube here. Live by the street, die by the street, Nike. It must be tougher in Beaverton than I realized. On a related note: thanks to the inventor of the Michael Vick chew toy, dogs can now metaphorically avenge their fallen...

Originally posted by Charles Star from Stay Free! Daily, on August 13, 2007 9:27 AM

Wilhelmina Vivian Romer-Mack was born last Tuesday night and after two nights in the hospital we arrived home as new parents. B ended up being induced but other than that had an unmedicated childbirth. Our doula and I were there to help and support her. It was one of the most intense and amazing things I've ever experienced. Here is a photo of Willa. I am hoping to return to more regular posting in a week or two.

Originally posted by joshua mack from DefinitiveInk, on August 13, 2007 8:05 AM

Could using a new kind of cooling system in a single office building really reduce carbon-dioxide emissions by the same amount as planting 1.9 million acres of trees?

That was the claim in a recent Associated Press article about ice-cooling systems, which use blocks of ice frozen at night and allowed to melt during the day, cooling the air as they do so. “A system in Credit Suisse’s offices at the historic Metropolitan Life tower in Manhattan is equal to taking 223 cars off the streets or planting 1.9 million acres of trees to absorb carbon dioxide from electrical use for a year, according to the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority,” the AP reported, in an article picked up by CNN.com and others. The Daily Telegraph of London also reported the number. (Numbers Guy reader Jason D’Amico doubted the claim about the trees — which would equal a forest bigger than Delaware — and suggested I look into it.)

In response to my inquiry, the New York State agency that had reported the number in a January 2006 press release checked its figures and found the acreage estimate was way off — by a factor of nearly 6,000. The press release has now been amended to say that the environmental benefit is equivalent to planting 320 acres of trees. The car estimate was amended in the other direction, albeit only slightly — from 223 cars up to 235 cars.

How did the wrong numbers creep into the press release? The state agency couldn’t say. “Unfortunately, the folks that put the release together are no longer here, so we are not sure what numbers or conversions were used to calculate that number,” spokeswoman Colleen Ryan told me. “It’s possible there was a decimal point issue or units issue, or perhaps they were referring to the number of trees and not acres. We’re just glad we were informed of this error in calculation so we were able to correct it.”

For the new calculation, the energy research and development agency converted the projected energy savings from the cooling system, then converted that into carbon dioxide reduction. Then it factored in estimates from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency about how much carbon dioxide is saved per acre of tree forest planted — 7,333 pounds per year. That and other estimates are used for this EPA online calculator. An EPA spokeswoman attributed the 7,333-pounds estimate to a U.S. Department of Agriculture Forest Service scientist, who didn’t immediately return my request for more information about the basis of that number. Representatives for the Associated Press and Trane Co., which designed the cooling system, also didn’t respond to my inquiries before this post was published.

A Credit Suisse spokesman told me: “The bottom line is that our ice-cooling system conserves a great deal of energy, reduces emissions and cuts costs. This is a good thing.”

It’s possible that the original number confused trees and acres. This chart from the University of Georgia forestry school shows that 320 acres of trees, with the trees spaced three feet-by-three feet, would contain 1.5 million trees. But it’s surprising that no one involved with the press release, nor the resulting press coverage, suspected that 1.9 million acres was a whole lot more trees than any one building’s cooling system could replace.

Further reading: In this post on toilet paper’s environmental impact, I noted the uncertainty in a commonly cited stat about how many trees are saved when people use recycled paper. More recently, I pointed out that environmental-impact estimates depend on what kind of emissions you look at.

Originally posted by (author unknown) from WSJ.com: The Numbers Guy, on August 13, 2007 4:22 AM

Pligg is for sale. Though I mentioned before that we adopted Pligg on Rocketboom, we actually wound up adapting some of Pligg for Moveable Type, and forked off the rest.

Jamie got almost everything we needed so far into just a couple of pages.

I actually just started participating in Digg myself. Im slowly ramping up but I feel a major swing coming on. I think YouTube and Digg are my top two favorite websites on the internet right now.

Originally posted by Drew from Dembot, on August 12, 2007 9:53 PM

 bookmark this on del.icio.us - posted by djacobs to dj-reblog watchthisspace vox - more about this bookmark...

Originally posted by djacobs from del.icio.us/subscriptions/djacobs, on August 12, 2007 7:26 PM

The Premise: Anyone who creates technologies that aspire to have significant cultural or social impacts on the developed world has to focus on both our lives at home and our lives at work. Anything less is an abdication of potential, or a failure of ambition, and settling for less denies many people the chance to discover tools or technologies that can improve their lives.

I was struck by John Siracusa's 'Stuck on the enterprise', which he wrote a few days ago. His assertion:

Sure, Apple makes periodic overtures in to big business. It even redirects apple.com/enterprise to someplace sensible. But nearly every Apple product or service ostensibly aimed at enterprise customers can also be seen as a natural part of some other, "non-enterprise" market where Apple is strong (e.g., creative professionals).

Unfailingly, Apple markets only to the end user these days. ... What Apple does not do is sell products to corporate IT that are meant for direct use by non-IT employees. That is, desktop PCs, and more recently, cellular phones.

Siracusa then goes on to list a series of enterprise desires for phones that he claims look "quite different than the iPhone", mainly centering around manageability and predictability. This is followed by a contention that these aims are incompatible with usability.

This is, to be blunt, horseshit. It's apologist blathering to cover up a failure of imagination and ambition. And it's saying that people cease to become people when they're at work, and are instead Enterprise Employees. These are the excuses that let the tech industry off the hook for failing to engage as many people as it should be.

This leads to an alarmingly wrongheaded conclusion:

[T]he decision to ignore markets where you must sell to someone other than the end user is pretty high-minded (for a corporation). It's also perhaps the only way to ever create great products, products that customers actually love.

No, this decision is elitist and lazy. Here's the truth: You can meet all the (reasonable) requirements of an Enterprise while still creating a product that delights and inspires the people who make up that organization.

In fact, you have to do so.

The only tools that succeed in an enterprise situation are those which are so compelling that people choose to use them in their free time. Look at email, instant messaging, hell -- look at the telephone. These staples of business communication are so popular because they meet the "I want this as part of my life" threshold. They can even be so good as to inspire addiction, complete with withdrawal in their absence.

If you create a tool as powerful as instant messaging, for example, you won't be able to stop adoption in the enterprise -- you'll just need to add enterprise features. And to those who proudly point out that the iPhone is "too cool to ever go to work", you can't also claim that enterprise IT will have to deal with it because it's popular. Unless you want to perpetuate the myth that we somehow transform into emotionless robots when we go to work, you have to acknowledge that Apple's going to make more and more improvements to accommodate them, and that's a good thing.

Of course, I have a dog in this fight. I'd advocated for years that blogging should be an enterprise tool, and helped my company ship Movable Type Enterprise, which was the first is the most popular enterprise blogging app around. I wrote a little bit about why in "Why do you care about business blogs so much?"

For the normal people, the ones who kind of maybe have heard of blogs, but certainly haven't tried them out yet themselves, discovering blogging as part of work will lead them to thinking about how blogs can change every part of their life. It's just like the millions of people who first used a web browser as part of their job, or the people who had an email address at work or school before they ever signed up for Hotmail or Gmail.

When I talk to companies about blogging, I ask them how their Knowledge Management or Enterprise Content Management deployments have succeeded. And they almost invariably mumble a bit about "it's sort of underperforming...". This is the dark outcome of people trying to draw a line between who we are at work and who we are at home. You end up with shoddy, compromised products like KM or groupware. And the folks in IT aren't unfeeling, tyrannical monsters; When I tell them "well, we'll give you LDAP integration, but it'll also have a UI that's easy enough that people choose to use these tools in their free time as a hobby", their eyes light up. They want to delight people, too.

That's the truth of it -- if you don't change the way people work, you can't claim to be changing their lives for the better. In the developed world, we spend most of our waking hours at work, and the impact is enormous. The success of PCs in the enterprise helped indirectly subsidize computers getting cheap enough to buy at home. The requirements for reliability and stability of a lot of enterprise software makes for better consumer user experiences. And of course, most of the shopping on eBay or Amazon or most of the ad-clicking on TMZ or Gizmodo happen while people are at work too. If the anti-enterprise advocates had their way, none of us would have web browsers at work, but we'd still be ideologically pure and stickin' it to the man. Yeah!

Except we'd be sticking it to ourselves, for 8 to 10 hours a day. If you believe in a technology, like I believe in blogging, or you believe in a company, like many fans believe in Apple, then expect more. Don't settle for compromises where we're supposed to have crappy tools for the work we do -- any good craftsman takes pride in using the best tools he can.

And above all, stop making excuses for the arrogant and exclusionary voices that want to limit promising new technologies to just those who can afford to pay for them at home, or who have the interest to chase down the latest tech. Everybody deserves to benefit from this stuff.

Originally posted by Anil from Anil Dash, on August 12, 2007 6:15 PM

Icon in computer break out shock, originally uploaded by pixellent.

Denise turned around and there he was, fresh as the day he was hatched in Twitchr, down in Brighton all those years ago. This is just fantastic.

Originally posted by Matt from Blackbeltjones/Work, on August 12, 2007 5:25 PM

Wow: Glen and Ken Aspeslagh’s hack for C4’s Iron Coder contest is a working two-way video conferencing app for iPhone. Jiminy.

#

Originally posted by John Gruber from Daring Fireball, on August 12, 2007 11:06 AM

The essence of being a Mets Fan
Originally uploaded by david.

First place all year, but still wearing a rally cap in the second
inning.

Originally posted by David Jacobs from hello, typepad, on August 12, 2007 10:12 AM

The essence of being a Mets Fan
Originally uploaded by david.

First place all year, but still wearing a rally cap in the second
inning.

Originally posted by David Jacobs from hello, typepad, on August 12, 2007 10:12 AM

More photos here.

Artist: Cayetano

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Wooster Collective, on August 12, 2007 8:44 AM

woodblock100 (User #53371) has one of the nicest looking user sites I've seen since I started this blog. David Bull is a woodblock printmaker living in Tokyo. His blog shows off his work (too many examples to list, but I like the scroll project and the Hanga Treasure Chest). David also has a woodblock webcam and a lengthy subsite about the progression of his work.

Originally posted by Jessamyn from Mefi User Sites, on August 12, 2007 7:49 AM

A Case for Fare-Free Public Transit.

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Social Design Notes, on August 12, 2007 5:59 AM

“Cartographers don’t lie, but they take a position”... “‘The problems of cartography are the same that exist in diplomatic relations’... For mapmakers like Nova Rico, disputes over geography are commonplace. For a Turkish customer, Cyprus is shown split in two, a division that Greek Cypriots do not recognize. In one globe, Chile gets parts of Antarctica that on another globe go to Argentina. And in much of the Arab world, Israel is nonexistent.”

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Social Design Notes, on August 12, 2007 5:57 AM