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

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