« October 21, 2007 - October 27, 2007 | Main | November 4, 2007 - November 10, 2007 »
HIG for OpenSocial? "If you're new to developing social applications, it can be difficult to immediately grasp how good applications facilitate fun and meaningful social experiences. ... Populate the application with fun or interesting content (especially content from friends) that makes for a browse-friendly experience. Make it easy for the user to add content, change settings and feel ownership of the application."
Keynote: Ian Cheney and Aaron Woolf, makers of the soon-to-be-released film King Corn.
Workshop topics include:
- Climate Change and Agriculture
- Connections between Racial Justice, Nutrition, Food and Neighborhood Health
- The Future of Urban Agriculture
- School Food
- New York's Global Food Footprint
- Using Technology to Promote Local Food
- Youth Curricula in Gardens and Schools
- Farm Bill
- Food Advocacy 101
- Farm to Institution Models
- Eating Local Throughout the Year
- Growing Urban Farmers
- So You Think You Want to be a Farmer?
- And much more!
Stay tuned to www.justfood.org for the complete list of workshops.
Various Artists CPH Postcard Set #1 $12 A collaboration between Justseeds and Stumptown Printers, this is a beautiful letter-pressed boxed set of 16 full color offset printed postcard versions of early Celebrate People's History posters. It's been years since some of the early posters have been in circulation, so this was a great way to recirculate the early posters, like Malcolm X and Mayday. Here's a complete list of the postcards included: Malcolm X, Mayday, John Brown, Dr. Marie Equi, Little Bighorn, Harriet Tubman, Sylvia Ray Rivera, Jane Collective, Emma Goldman, Augusto Sandino, Battle of Homestead, Fred Hampton, Elise Reclus, Wangari Maathai, Phoolan Devi and Mujeres Libres. 16 offset postcards 4"x6" letter-pressed box
three pigs bento box
Originally uploaded by luckysundae.A more practical but no less fun take on bento: Just Bento.
Lucky duck Laren Spirer, food editor of Gothamist, looks like she was in Italy doing some shopping somewhat recently, where she said buon giorno to these residents of the root cellar. This particular photo just said fall to me. Buon appetito!
So I'm a week late on this, but it looks like the moratorium on all baseball-related announcements during the World Series didn't apply to baseball cards. After reading what everybody else has had to say on this, it looks like I'll be in the singular on this when I say that the design doesn't do much for me.
It seems that Topps is big on borders lately, be they black (like 2007) or white (like 2008), and it's not doing it for me. They've always had a border of some sort, but so thick? What's the point of that? It just makes me think that their designers couldn't come up with enough to fill the space. I'm also not a big fan of making the Topps logo a focal point of the card. They could just as easily have moved the circus circle type down a bit and moved the logo to a corner.
You know, I see what they're doing here. This is a throwback, old school/new school design aimed at bridging gaps between my generation of collectors and kids today. But the sets it's referencing, the 1986's and the 1988's, they had thin borders (by comparison). Also, what's up with the foil name?
See other A Pack A Day writer sites for more info:
Cardboard Junkie
Stale Gum
... but now things have changed on all Serious Eats profile pages. Last night we added fields for Location, About, and Last Bite on Earth. Head on over to your profile page, if you'd like, and share a little bit about yourself! (Strictly voluntary, of course.)
Of course it is. Totally predictable. But what's really fun is LATer Suzanne Muchnic's story of how it got there....
One of the most oft-repeated slams against congestion pricing we heard at this week's Congestion Mitigation Committee hearings is that congestion pricing would be a "regressive tax," an unfair burden to poorer New Yorkers.
Is congestion pricing regressive? The data suggests otherwise.
As the chart above shows, even in Brooklyn Council member Lew Fidler's heavily auto-dependent district, households with a car earn more than twice the income than households without. Meanwhile, only 5.3% of workers living in Fidler's distrit drive to work in Manhattan south of 86th Street (unfortunately, Fidler is probably one of them). Fact sheets for Richard Brodsky, Vivian Cook, Denny Farrell, Jeffrey Dinowitz and other congestion pricing opponents' districts are equally revealing and very much worth a download. Cook, for example, represents a Queens district where only 3.5% of workers drive into the proposed charging zone for work.
In testimony before the Traffic Congestion Mitigation Commission, the Tri-State Transportation Campaign argued the point. From this week's Mobilizing the Region:
Some anti-pricing politicians seem to have dressed up for Halloween as populists defending “working stiffs” from a “regressive tax” on driving. But an analysis of Census data by TSTC and the Pratt Center for Community Development shows that, in all but one State Assembly district in NYC, vehicle-owning households are 50% wealthier than households without a vehicle; in nearly half of districts, average income is twice as high.
Furthermore, only a small minority of commuters drive alone to the proposed congestion pricing zone (CPZ); this is true not only in Manhattan but in the outer boroughs and the surrounding suburban counties. For example, only 5.1% of workers from Rockland County drive alone to the proposed CPZ. In Westchester, 3.4% of workers drive alone to the CPZ. In Nassau and Suffolk Counties, the percentages are even lower.
Fact sheets containing a breakdown of commuting patterns by mode and destination, vehicle ownership statistics, and the average incomes of vehicle-owning households and non-vehicle-owning households are available online. The fact sheets cover counties and City Council, state Assembly, state Senate, and U.S. Congressional districts in the New York metropolitan area.
New York Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg will declare his support today for a national carbon tax, according to a report posted this morning on the New York Times City Room blog by metro reporter Sewell Chan:
Mayor Bloomberg plans to announce today his support for a national carbon tax. In what his aides are calling one of the most significant policy addresses of his second and final term, the mayor will argue that directly taxing emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases that contribute to climate change will slow global warming, promote economic growth and stimulate technological innovation — even if it results in higher gasoline prices in the short term.
Mr. Bloomberg is scheduled to present his carbon tax proposal in a speech this afternoon at a two-day climate protection summit in Seattle organized by the United States Conference of Mayors. (A copy of the speech was provided to The New York Times by aides to the mayor; the full text is available here, along with the complete Times story.)
Needless to say, Charles Komanoff at the recently spiffed-up Carbon Tax Center, thinks this is a big deal (worthy of an Oscar or a Nobel Peace Prize, perhaps?):
With his speech today, Mayor Bloomberg joins former Vice-President Al Gore as the nation's leading advocates of a carbon tax to cap and reduce carbon emissions from fossil fuels.
And consistent with the Mayor's local transportation policy push:
Bloomberg's support of a U.S. carbon tax is philosophically consistent with his big current local initiative, a congestion pricing plan to improve mobility, economic activity and the quality of life in the Manhattan Central Business District by charging an entry fee for motor vehicles. A carbon tax and congestion pricing both embody the principle that safeguarding “the commons” -- our air, water and public space -- requires that we exact from ourselves a commensurate price for uses that damage or deplete it.
the Orkut sandbox is moderated, so Plaxo Pulse is the only live implementation so far
AT&T's new data plans for iPhone users help to relief international travelers from outrageous phone bills once they return. For an extra $25 or $60, you can get a good amount of data on your iPhone while you make that business trip to China and not even have to purchase an extra phone for it.
I get questions, oh boy do I get questions, and I should really answer more of them here. Maybe not the ones that read "i need that fabric 4 my prom dress and its saturday can u help me pleeeeeeze !!!?!", but more of the ones that are thoughtful, such as this one from Lynn:Your blog is fun to read – am totally obsessed with vintage and quirky attire, patterns, fabrics and such as you publish each day. And so I want to make something to wear more than once for Halloween. Yet, my 40 hour per week day job is working among engineering types who are usually the most dismally, drably dressed humans on the planet. (Exception: a few bridge geeks who love local thrift stores – and keeping their money!)
Yet, since I work here one could successfully argue that my tendencies are also towards introversion and I have plenty of drab-colored basics in my closet. I don’t want to stick out very much. And since I work I have time constraints.
How would you select sewing projects (I can do about 6 or 8 projects per year) that would not stick too far out from the baggy denim and jersey uniforms that surround me? A drab jersey wiggle dress? Or perhaps a brightly patterned skirt with a drab denim jacket?
Your assistance is hugely appreciated! Probably lots more sewing wannabes are in the same predicament.
First off, thank you, Lynn, for the kind words ...
Secondly, I wouldn't underestimate your co-workers. Even if they don't want to wear bright colors and interesting prints themselves, they may certainly appreciate them on others -- much in the same way that I wear completely boring jewelry myself, but am always drawn to people who are wearing interesting pieces. Remember also, that if they're men, their clothing choices are artificially constrained -- not everyone is as dedicated to finding fun shirts as Francis.
But to answer your question, I can't answer your question. Only you can answer your question. And this is how you do it. Spend some time online on one of the sewing pattern sites -- BurdaStyle, or Sewingpatterns.com -- or in the fabric store, looking through the patterns. Make a list of EVERY pattern that catches your eye, everything that you like. Don't do any editing. If you like a wedding dress and you've been married for twenty years, still put it down. If you like some elaborate Issey Miyake outfit where the difficulty level is marked as 'For Issey Miyake Only', put it down. If you like a pair of gauchos, even, put it down. (I think this is better done online, because you can bookmark the pages or even save the images you like to your desktop.)
Once you've made your looooong list, then you can go through it. If you're a beginner, put aside the complicated tailored suits -- just for now. Maybe put aside that wedding dress. (DEFINITELY put aside the gauchos.) But try to look for commonalities in the patterns you chose. Do they all have raglan sleeves? Do they all have full skirts? Did all the illustrations you really show the garment in purple fabric? Try to jot down any similarities you see in the patterns you liked. (My list would look something like 'midriff band, full skirt, kimono sleeve, yellow, gingham, peter pan collar', etc.) Look for patterns on your list that have most of the features that you like, and that are at your sewing level. (Then go check Pattern Review to see if other people liked it!)
Then go look at your closet. You can't make a whole new wardrobe in 6-8 pieces a year (and you should assume a 10% failure rate, so one piece will just flat-out not work, and one will only mostly work). What can you sew that will go with clothes you already love? (If you don't love any of your clothes, you might want to read this post.) If you have lots of print skirts and plain tops, maybe a coordinating easy jacket in a solid color? If you have lots of plain trousers, why not try a tailored skirt or a print blouse? If you can't figure out what will "fit" -- try a stand-alone dress.
I feel sewing is the most rewarding when you're making something you love AND will wear, so your goal is to find that sweet spot where a pattern calls to you AND it will fit into your wardrobe.
And Lynn, I know you said you don't want to 'stand out,' but take a minute to decide what you want more: anonymity, or happiness. If you really love bright green and want to make a bright green dress, just do it! I think you'll be surprised at how positive people's reactions will be. I wear the craziest stuff -- you've all seen it -- and the worst reaction I've gotten has been something like "I'm glad you wore that, dear ... so few people would." Mostly people say things like "I wish I could wear that." (To which I always reply, "Of course you can!")
If you really don't want to stand out, pick drab colors but patterns with interesting details -- pockets, nifty collars, fun seam lines -- most people will only see the color, not the design elements. Or try some stealth fun with color: bright pocket linings or hem facings. (Even my plain skirts have print pocket linings. Life's too short to not have pockets full of fun.)
I know I gave lip service to separates up above, but really -- try a dress. I think you'll be surprised at how fun they are to wear (especially the Duro) and the sense of accomplishment you'll get from finishing one.
So, to sum up: figure out what really really appeals to YOU, and then make it. Then you can make it work, I promise. Happiness in your clothes is the best accessory.
And good luck!
[picture is one of my Flickr favorites, by alexanderdrachmann]
Photo Nicked From Here.
(Thanks, David!)
A few quick thoughts about OpenSocial. As you can see here, outside.in is one of the launch partners for the OpenSocial platform. In fact, our developer Christian Niles was out at the GooglePlex earlier this week for a last minute Hackathon before the announcement. We're going to have much more to say about our OpenSocial application in the coming weeks, but obviously the great promise here lies in combining those two big mega-themes of the past few years: the social graph (as you're now obliged to call it) and the geo-web.
Interestingly, we did not know until a few days ago that the APIs would extend to other social network platforms -- our guess was that it would live inside of Orkut, but that Orkut would become more tightly integrated with other Google applications, like Gmail. Obviously, we're thrilled that the platform is going to be as inclusive as it is. And what a brilliant move by Google. (I suppose as a launch partner, I'm biased, but still: what a brilliant move.) That $15 billion Facebook valuation got a lot of abuse over the past few weeks, but in a way I thought it made sense. Obviously, there was risk involved, but if you thought that Facebook had a reasonable shot at becoming "the social operating system of the Web", then it was probably worth making the bet -- particularly given that Microsoft had other reasons to invest. A company that runs the web's "social operating system" could easily be worth $50B or $100B. But that seems entirely impossible now, just a few days later, thanks to OpenSocial. If there is going to be a social operating system, it's going to be the open one that wins out.
And the open nature of the platform also makes it much harder for Facebook to exploit lock-in, since it will now be much easier for consumers to move over to the next, coolest social networking site. Thus far, the history of social networks sites shows that they are way more vulnerable to the whims of fashion than, say, search engines have been -- no doubt because teenagers and twenty-somethings have been their primary audience. By creating a bigger platform, Facebook was trying to fortify itself against this threat, but OpenSocial will likely accelerate the cycles of social network fashion. Big new networks will pop up every 12 months, instead of every three years.
Posted by Joe Kraus, Director of Product Management
As the web goes, so goes Google, and that's why we care about making the web better. Five months ago, we launched Google Gears to make the web better by making it work offline. Now, we want to make the web better by making it more social.
A tremendous amount of activity is occurring on social networks these days. Hundreds of millions of people share photos, rate movies, and throw virtual sheep at one another. All these social networks are looking to give their communities more and more things to do -- and they realize they can't do it on their own. They need to open up and become platforms for developers to extend. So, many social networks have looked at, or launched, their own APIs that typically do the same kinds of things: give access to user profiles and friend networks, and allow an application to post activities so that everyone's circle of friends knows what the others are doing. All of this has been good news, because developers could get their applications onto a social network.
But there's a problem: it wasn't one or two social networks doing this, but ten or fifteen. Now, to get on all the social networks a developer has had to customize their application for each one. When your "development team" is just one or two people, the proliferation of APIs forces you to make tough choices, because you can't do that much one-off work. Not only is this situation bad for developers, it's bad for consumers too: When developers can't afford to do the work to make their applications work on a certain social network, the people using those networks lose out.
That's why today we're excited to introduce OpenSocial, a set of common APIs that make it easy to create and host social applications on the web. OpenSocial allows developers to write an application once that will run anywhere that supports the OpenSocial APIs.
It's good for developers because it makes it easier for them to focus on making their web apps better; they get lots of distribution with a lot less work. It's good for websites, because they can tap into the creativity of the largest possible developer community (and no longer have to compete with one another for developer attention). And finally, it's good for users, because they get more applications in more places. Global members of the OpenSocial community include MySpace, Engage.com, Friendster, hi5, Hyves, imeem, LinkedIn, Ning, Oracle, orkut, Plaxo, Salesforce.com, Six Apart, Tianji, Viadeo, and XING.
We were thrilled to see so many partners turn out for our very first CampFire One event, a small gathering of developers at the Googleplex. They do the best job of explaining why they support this vision of an open, programmable web. And so in the spirit of being social, we want to share the video from tonight's event.
In David Denby's review of American Gangster, he made an interesting point:
Our loyalties are split between the hero of virtue and the hero of vice. We don't have to choose, which is fine - irresponsibility is one of the pleasures of narrative movies.
david posted a photo:
Foie Gras, Prosciutto, Figs, Basil, Ricotta (?) Cheese, Tomatoes
Atlanta is 110 days away from running out of drinking water? I knew the South was in the midst of a serious drought, but somehow I'd hadn't quite processed the magnitude of the problem.
UPDATE: Here's a blog devoted to the story. It turns out that there are competing estimates on the number of days. And the problem, it seems, is the result of long term forces and not just a short to medium-term drought.
Mark my words - water will be the defining issue of the 21st century.
Spammers have created a Windows game which shows a woman in a state of undress when people correctly type in text shown in an accompanying image.The scrambled text images come from sites which use them to stop computers automatically signing up for accounts that can be put to illegal use.
By getting people to type in the text the spammers can take over the accounts and use them to send junk mail.
I've been saying that spammers would start doing this for years. I'm actually surprised it took this long.
She's actually doing it! Britney Spears is making a huge comeback, of sorts. The singer's new album, Blackout, is selling like hotcakes, and it's looking like Brit is going to knock Carrie Underwood right out of Billboard's top spot. Britney's newest set of tunes has already doubled the amount of sales Carrie had, within the same amount of time, so, if this keeps up, Britney will have five out of five number one studio albums. Not bad for a walking (and driving) train wreck!
To go along with Blackout, Britney has revamped her website, Britney.com. The new site has photos, videos, and a blog (yay!) written mostly by someone named "BRITannica," who claims to be "literally an encyclopedia of Britney knowledge."
Could "BRITannica" be that crazy Chris guy, who pleaded for us to leave Brit alone? Perhaps.
Anyway, my absolute favorite part of Britney's new website is its slogan -- "It's Britney.com, bitch!"
LOVE IT!
New York City residents should check out Milk-n-Honey, "a multimedia theatrical performance about Americans, food, appetite, and happiness" currently playing at 3-Legged Dog until November 18. Each night after the show you can snack on free cupcakes and participate in special events in the After Show Café.
"So the Senator who didn't think Halliburton's war profiteering was worth investigating is endorsing the candidate who wanted to put Bernie Kerik in charge of Homeland Security. Makes sense to us!"— Andy Barr, campaign manager for Al Franken, responding in the Huffington Post to Senator Norm Coleman's endorsement of Rudy Giuliani.
credit: justseamus
In the first of many shorts we will present over consecutive days, The Open Planning Project's Executive Director Mark Gorton tours the streets of the Upper West Side with neighbor Lisa Sladkus pointing out problems in advance of the November 6 Streets Renaissance Workshop with Jan Gehl. Today's topic is: Double Parking.Parking policy is one of the biggest challenges that faces New York City and the rest of the U.S. In this related StreetFilm, Donald Shoup explains how responsible pricing can solve the woes of double parking and pollution, while raising revenues that can be re-invested in communities.
Team Spaces :
Second in a series of Bathroom Experiences : Bathroom Blogfest 2007
There are a lot of great cultural indicators and collaborative spaces in the Adaptive Path office. But my favorite is still the bathrooms. Bathrooms as culture? As collaborations? Um…huh?
The bathrooms at AP are humane, interesting, fun and attractive spaces. As a result, they’ve become places that showcase what we value: human-centeredness, design-awareness, accessibility, smarts, participation and play.
I believe that bathrooms are a key indicator of a team culture. Office bathrooms are spaces that are often ignored, where effort is minimized, where meeting the bare basics are deemed to be enough. What a loss. I think great team cultures create great bathrooms…and I suspect that the reverse is also true.
Want a great team? Start with exceeding expectations in the most surprising of places: invest in a great bathroom.
With apologies to Maslow, I’ve outlined a hierarchy of bathroom needs from the bare basics up to a fully-actualized office bathroom cultural experience.
- toilet & toilet paper
- sink
- paper towels/ air dryer
- trash can
- clean, dry floor
- door
- ADA accessible
Basics +
- a good lock on the door
- mirror
- non-controlled toilet paper dispenser (you know…the kind that give you more than one square at a time…)
- toilet seat covers
- extra basic supplies (paper towels, toilet paper)
Quality space
- 2-ply toilet paper
- accessible storage for extra supplies
- coat rack/ purse hooks
- air-circulating fan
- completely clean and tidy
Quality experience
- supplies area with additional amenities: extra toilet paper & paper towels, first aid kit, pain-killers, air-purifying spray, feminine supplies, etc.
- someplace to sit other than the toilet
- full-length mirror
- color: walls painted non-institutional / non-boring colors
- residential-grade fixtures and finishes
- exterior window
Cultural experience
- plants
- art, especially art created by employees
- unique fixtures / furnishings
- toys / activities
- collaborative / participative work
Probably no office bathroom has all of these, and I’m sure there are some items missing from the list. The the ones that are really special and reflect the unique aspects of the culture do it by focusing on the top of the pyramid.
The point is that bathrooms signal what’s important to the team culture:
- Does the bathroom feel more personal than institutional?
- Do you care about keeping the bathroom clean because you care about the other people that use it?
- Can you get a good look at yourself in a good mirror before that big meeting so that you don’t embarrass your team with spinach in your teeth?
- Do you enjoy seeing artworks created by your team members?
- And the big one…are you trusted not to misuse the supply of toilet paper?
As you move your bathroom design to the higher levels, the more humane, culturally reflective and engaging the space becomes. And that’s got to impact how people feel about working and being together as a team.
In our office, the stuff that get positive notice from visitors, clients and team members are always things at the top of the pyramid:
- the Eames House of Cards deck, and the custom set of staff face cards made to match
- strange art that happens from things lying around, like toys and tchotchkes
- paint colors and art on the walls
- Sticky-note collages that invitate people to post thoughts, opinions or other info
- commentary on team members, taking form as participatory art
- collaborative work that uses bathroom walls
So grab a plant, some art, some toys or some sticky notes and put ‘em n your office bathroom. See how the team responds. And let me know how it goes!
Participants in Bathroom Blogfest ‘07
Adaptive Path | Blog Till You Drop | checking out and checking in | Customer Experience Crossroads | Customers Are Always | Customers Rock! | Diva Marketing | Experienceology | Fast Company Now | Flooring the Consumer | Get Fresh Minds | K+B DeltaVee | Library Bytes | Life and its little pleasures | Practical Katie | Purple Wren | Qualitative Research | Results Revolution | Spirit Women | The Curious Shopper | The Engaging Brand | The Ultimate Corporate Entrepreneur | Transcultural
Anthony Bourdain tells Time that the worst thing he has ever eaten is fermented shark in Iceland, adding that "[Icelanders] celebrate their hardy Viking roots by eating shark that has essentially been rotted and then marinated in lactic acid for six months. There was also the warthog rectum in Namibia. Steer clear of that." On why he picks on Rachael Ray: "She genuinely offends me ... When Rachael tells you that it's perfectly OK to buy pre-chopped onion from the supermarket, I mean, how hard is it to chop an onion?"
Couple empirical-data-backed arguments that the whole “Userss don’t scroll” rule is BS: from boxes and arrows and the clicktale blog.
Nintendo president Satoru Iwata has revealed that the company is planning to add new functions to its DS handheld that are 'more practical than entertaining'.
Although he didn't provide hard specifics, Iwata told the Wall Street Journal that the features would be useful in train stations, amusement parks or museums and use wireless functions.
Ooh. GPS, I bet, for starters.
The Psychologist has just made an article available that looks at the parallels between the most recent David Lynch film, Inland Empire, and what we know of the psychology of psychosis.
The article looks at some of the proposed pathologies of psychosis, drawn from cognitive science, and suggests how these are represented in Lynch's latest movie.
Paranoia comes with an inherent sense of personal threat and concomitant fear. Inland Empire’s dark and chilling world is produced in part by David Lynch’s use of story. While fear is generated with genuinely unsettling imagery and dark shadowy lighting, it also comes from the carefully managed attrition of any recognisable storyline. The audience, who have been led through the early stages of the plot with some of the conventional devices of storytelling (coherent dialogue, linear chronology) are suddenly thrown into a world of unfamiliar film cuts, unexplained locations and wordless acting. We are forced to jump to our own conclusions and build what narrative we will from scant concrete evidence as to events. Our sense of sense itself forces us to put something together and, given the presence of ominous emotions and apparent malice, what we put together is a paranoid and terrifying vision of the intentions of the characters in the film and even the world we inhabit.
Lynch's hallucinatory style certainly suggests altered realities and this is not the first time that it has been linked with mind-being reality distortion, as countless interpretations of Mulholland Drive testify.
Link to article 'David Lynch and psychosis'.
We have only one motivation for doing this website. And that's to share with you those things that inspire us.
In the five years of updating this site each day, we have never disclosed the identity of an artist without their permission and understanding.
We know that many of you have sent us emails and links with good intentions, but please know that featuring photos that allegedly show the identity of an artist who wants to be anonymous is just not something that we are interested in doing. We have no idea if any of the numerous photos we receive each week are real, and in truth we couldn't care less one way or the other.
Plain and simple. It's not what we're all about.
At the Ethnic Market highlights international specialty foods and ingredients that you're very unlikely to find at your local Gristedes. Many of you out there remember snacking on pistachio nuts whose shells had been dyed red. Heck, as kids half the fun was watching your hands change color. The other day we found some pistachios that are just as fun to eat, but decidely more grown-up. While browsing among the dried nuts and fruits at Mazal Kosher Foods in Forest Hills, we came across a bin of pistachios that seemed larger than the supermarket variety. The nuts were also studded with coarse salt. When asked by the shopkeeper to try some, Gothamist entered pistachio paradise. They had a wonderful roasted flavor and a lemony kick that combined with the coarse salt made them impossible to stop eating. Rather than continue noshing in the store we promptly purchased a pound. We can't wait to try them with cocktails at our next dinner party. Don't want to travel to Forest Hills to get your hands on some Iranian pistachios? No worries, they're also available in Manhattan at Kalyustan's. Mazal Kosher Food, 63-66 108 St., Forest Hills, 718-459-5707 Kalyustan's,123 Lexington Ave., 212-685-3451
I love this awesome ghost cupcake with innards of green buttercream frosting and a gumdrop for a brain that Jill Davis found at Wheatberry Bakery in Pasadena, California. The only way I could imagine it being cooler is if they had used a red or licorice gumdrop instead.
Are people really going to maintain multiple sets of front-end pages for their web sites for Facebook, Open Social, etc.?
I think so, yes. I think any web site going forward that wants maximum distribution across the largest number of users will have a single back-end, and then multiple sets of front-end pages:
- One set of standard HTML and Javascript pages for consumption by normal web browser.
- Another set of HTML and Javascript pages that use the Open Social API’s Javascript calls for consumption with Open Social containers/social networks.
- A third set of pages in FBML (Facebook Markup Language) that use Facebook’s proprietary APIs for consumption within Facebook as a Facebook app.
- Perhaps a fourth set of pages adapted for the Apple iPhone and/or other mobile devices.
From Mark Andreessen, [via Lee Semel]
Four versions of every front-end! It’s worse than the great Browser (incompatibility) Wars of ‘99-’97. This sounds like hell.
Oftentimes, there is perceived to be a disconnect between making money and winning ballgames. This is perhaps inevitable, because it’s easy to see how expenditures on talented players can negatively impact a team’s bottom line, but more difficult to see how the extra wins those players generate can positively impact a team’s top line. But they do, sometimes profoundly, like when those wins lead a team into the playoffs or toward a championship.
I believe that professional baseball clubs should be run with the objective of maximizing long-run profits, but I also believe that there is strong alignment between this goal and winning championships. It doesn’t take long to look at the attendance turnarounds at places like Comerica Park or U.S. Cellular Field — or the vacant upper decks at Camden Yards and PNC Park — to see what I’m talking about.
Now, that doesn’t mean that reconciling wins and profit is easy, so teams need some kind of a framework to orient their decision-making. There are two fundamental ways to go about it.
The Payroll Budget: Maximize the number of wins, holding payroll constant. In other words: “Let’s build the best team that we can for $80 million dollars”.
The Wins Budget: Minimize payroll, holding wins constant. In other words: “Let’s build the cheapest team that we can expect to win 92 ballgames”.
The payroll budget is, of course, the more traditional way to go about it, and the way that the overwhelming majority of major league clubs align their decision-making. You’ll read all kind of statements in the press this kind of year like “The Rockies have approved a payroll increase to $65 million” or “The Red Sox want to keep payroll in the $130 million range”. But this is the improper framework. Payroll is not the thing that you want to hold constant.
The reason is that a fixed payroll figure does not tell you anything in the abstract. How do you set your payroll figure? It does not tell you how many games your team is likely to win. The Yankees spent $190 million last year and won 94 ballgames. The Indians spent $61 million last year and also won 94 ballgames. Nor does it tell you how much profit your team can expect to make, because it looks only at the income side, and not at the expense side. Perhaps the Blue Jays can spend $80 million next year and make $80 million dollars. Or, they can spend $90 million next year and make $100 million dollars. Which one should they choose? Well, the answer should be obvious to anyone with a fifth grade education. But it doesn’t seem to be obvious to a number of major league baseball clubs, who can’t see the revenue forest for the payroll trees.
The Wins Budget resolves this problem because the number of wins that we choose does mean something. For example, a “budget” of 90 wins means that a team is going to reach the playoffs as often as not, and a budget of 95 wins means that a team is almost always going to reach the playoffs. Moreover, we do have some idea of which wins figures tend to maximize profits. Generally, there are two equilibria, one of which comes at 90-95 wins where the team becomes very likely to make the playoffs, and the other of which comes at some much lower figure — perhaps 60 or 65 wins — where a club is fielding a team’s worth of “freely-available talent” (either players picked off the waiver wire, or players from their farm system whose salaries are substantially below market because they have not yet become free agents).
The concept of the Wins Budget looms large in the Hot Stove Preview that I just completed. As you’ll see from reading that series, setting a Wins Budget is not always straightforward. Teams are not just trying to maximize profits in 2008; rather, they are trying to do so over the long run. There may be times when some budget between the two equilibria makes sense. This might be because the team is moving from the 60-win pole to the 90-win pole but can’t get there in one off-season, or because there are certain inflection points at which a team’s product offering becomes credible or non-credible to its fans. Moreover, the Wins Budget is impacted by the strength of a team’s division, by the peculiarities of its fan base, and by the expectations that the team has established for himself. An Wins Budget of 88 would probably be fine (e.g. profit-maximizing) for the Brewers. It would probably not be optimal for the Red Sox. Nevertheless, for the most part teams should be gravitating toward one of the two equilibria: the “Playoff Contender” equilibrium and the “Rebuilding Year” equilibrium.
The Wins Budget was a particularly important concept my discussion of the Dodgers. Suppose that the Dodgers set a Wins Budget of 94 next year, which means that they’re almost definitely going to make the playoffs, and quite possibly be the best team in their league. (Let’s ignore for a moment the question of whether 94 wins is a more optimal choice than 88 or 71 or 102). What is the cheapest way that the Dodgers can build a 94-win team?
Well, it certainly does not involve Alex Rodriguez. The reason is that they already have a third baseman in Andy LaRoche who is (i) very cheap and (ii) could be pretty good. On the other hand, the center fielder is Juan Pierre, and the fifth starter is probably Esteban Loaiza, both of which are significant problems. Suppose that instead of spending $30 million on A-Rod, the Dodgers instead spent $25 million on Curt Schilling and Aaron Rowand. I would guess that when we run the PECOTA projections for those players in a couple months time, we’ll come up with something like the following:
Player VORP 3B Alex Rodriguez 70 CF Juan Pierre 10 SP Esteban Loaiza 5 Total 85 Player VORP 3B Andy LaRoche 25 CF Aaron Rowand 40 SP Curt Schilling 40 Total 105The Rowand/Schilling bundle of players is not only likely to be a little cheaper than the A-Rod bundle, but also a little better, by a margin of about 20 runs (or two wins). This does not really have anything to do with A-Rod, but rather with the configuration of talent that is already on the Dodgers. For the Phillies, who have no kind of third baseman at all, bringing in A-Rod could well be the optimal strategy.
The point is that, once a team establishes its Wins Budget, there are any number of ways to achieve it. It’s not that the Dodgers should sign A-Rod because they shouldn’t try to win 94 games. It’s that there are more efficient ways to accomplish the same thing.
Alex Frankel recounts his experience as an Apple Retail Store employee, and in doing so reveals why the stores have done so well.
Yesterday, after waking up at 4 a.m. and making my way through the freezing cold, pitch black morning, I was the first one on line at the semi-annual Manolo Blahnik sample sale -- the shopping event (that I attended last year) which has gotten New York ladies in a tizzy for the past ten years. When the time came for the doors to open, I witnessed evil in its purest form as every woman scrambled to the table with her size. Despite the fact that everyone was shoving, trying to get to the door first and throwing as many shoes into their bags as possible, it was well worth it to come away with my three beautiful pairs of Manolos -- and maybe just a scratch or two.
Christopher Lenz: “As I haven’t seen anyone writing much about the state of Python development on Mac OS X Leopard, here’s a quick rundown.” (Via Simon Willison.)
Apparently Stephen Colbert isn't kidding about this, at least as far as the Dem primary in South Carolina goes.
Bruce Tognazzini, back in 1989:
We’ve done a cool $50 million of R&D on the Apple Human Interface. We discovered, among other things, two pertinent facts:
- Test subjects consistently report that keyboarding is faster than mousing.
- The stopwatch consistently proves mousing is faster than keyboarding.
This contradiction between user-experience and reality apparently forms the basis for many user/developers’ belief that the keyboard is faster. […]
It takes two seconds to decide upon which special-function key to press. Deciding among abstract symbols is a high-level cognitive function. Not only is this decision not boring, the user actually experiences amnesia! Real amnesia! The time-slice spent making the decision simply ceases to exist.
I read this long ago in Tognazzini’s Tog on Interface, and have been looking for a URL to it for years. Found it via the aforelinked article by Scott Stevenson.
Help shape the neighborhood streets of the Upper West Side. Work with your neighbors to create beautiful, green streets with safer bike lanes, great walking spaces, less traffic and cleaner air. The Upper West Side Streets Renaissance Campaign is holding a series of events aimed at empowering residents to re-imagine neighborhood streets and make their visions a reality.
A Workshop With Jan Gehl, the World's Foremost Urban Designer
Tuesday, November 6th, 2007, 5:30-7:00 pm
The Jewish Community Center
334 Amsterdam Avenue at West 76th Street
Opening Reception, 7:00-8:30 Presentation
DOT Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan will be there too. Admission is free. Seating is very limited and RSVP is required.
the post-dated press release offers more info, with URLs that aren't live yet
If you haven't heard it already, WNYC's Arun Venugopal has an outstanding piece on New York City's rapidly changing transportation policies regarding bicycling. We hear from T.A.'s Noah Budnick, Copenhagen's Jan Gehl, DOT Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan, NYPD Chief Ray Kelly, Judy Ross of Times Up, and a moron in a huge SUV. Click here or press the play button below:
REPORTER: Jan Gehl is an urban designer, also from Copenhagen, who advises the city's Department of Transportation. Like his friend and mentor, the late Jane Jacobs, Gehl speaks of the 'humanization' of the city's streets, which he thinks have become 'infested' by cars. But Gehl thinks Manhattan, given its density and flatness, is perfectly positioned for a wide-scale conversion.
GEHL: It would be a piece of cake to have a really high class bicycle system which could take care of half of the commuting in Manhattan.
REPORTER: Gehl thinks that the political pressures arising from gas prices and the green movement will force the city to adopt bicycling fast. He says real change may be visible here within 5 years, and that the city could be profoundly altered in about 10 years. As more people take to riding bikes, it becomes safer, which in turn encourages more people to ride. Gehl sees major economic benefits as well, as people tend to linger more - in public plazas, or stores or sidewalk cafes - when air and noise pollution go down.
GEHL: In Europe increasingly we are trying to make the cities so that they are wonderful places, where you like to go out and sit and have meals and watch your fellow citizens, talk with them in spaces which are not completely filled with noise. Something about being a public citizens who enjoys his city.
...
As we ride along 8th avenue, we're forced into the car lane because of all the double-parking law-breakers.
At one point, a man in a huge SUV pulls up next to us and honks his horn. The driver rolls down his window, and he shouts, 'There's only one bike lane, bro!'
Noah ignores him, then watches as the guy runs a red light. And he's at peace.
BUDNICK: the next thing, he's stuck in gridlock, and you're 10 blocks ahead of him five minutes later. Brings a smile.
The Pompadour typeface, from the 1837 specimen of the Tarbé foundry.
Happy Halloween.
So on Monday, about lunchtime, my sister Kate sent me a link to the awesome Diana Eng's supercool Lego costume.
I desperately needed a costume for my son's school Halloween party THAT SAME NIGHT, so I went ahead and put one together ... with a few modifications for the lazy.
First of all, you can't buy spray paint in Chicago (and I didn't have time to wait for it to dry anyway) so I ran to Home Depot and bought a roll of the widest blue painter's masking tape they had (cost me about $11). Then I hopped across the street to Party City and bought a package of plastic bowls in the same blue ($4). I taped the box completely, then I cut the holes for my head and arms. (I use an old serrated steak knife to cut cardboard.)
After trying it on to gauge proper placement, I stapled the bowls to the front of the box with an ordinary Swingline stapler (not a red one). I used a stapler because I'm sure I have a glue gun around here somewhere, but bless me if I can find it. I asked my son to bring me a real Lego block for reference, grabbed a Sharpie, and wrote LEGO on all the bowls.
The whole costume, not counting driving to the store or the time it took me to move some bikes in the garage so I could get to the right-size box, was done in about twenty minutes. Sweet! No sewing required, even!
I have to say that it was really fun to be a giant Lego. Lots of kids came up to me and said "ARE YOU A ... LEGO?" (I was good and said "Yes" and not "No, I'm a banana.") I also joked that Legos are very scary to parents. They multiply and always end up underfoot ...
Thanks very much to Kate for the link and to Diana (and the folks at CRAFT) for the idea!
And in unrelated news, if you want to see me wearing the yellow-bird dress, there's a picture up here.
A new Zogby poll shows Hillary Clinton leading the Democratic field nationally with 38% support, followed by Barack Obama at 24% and John Edwards with 12%. Nobody else earns more than 2% support.
The margins are statistically unchanged from their poll in mid-September, with the top three candidates all gaining two to three points over that result.
The fellow at Undress Me Robot isn’t the only one with a crush on my friend an colleague Erin McKean (who is married, has a cute little boy, and will probably respond to your belles lettres d’amour with a polite and pert “Thanks!"). There is this person. And this one. And this one, too.
Portfolio has a nice little profile of her in its Job of the Week section.
Never mind. The error is now fixed.
Where it saysComputer searches helped persuade her to add the words taikonautedamame (a Chinese astronaut); (Japanese soybeans boiled in their pods and served as an appetizer)…
it should say
Computer searches helped persuade her to add the words taikonaut (a Chinese astronaut); edamame (Japanese soybeans boiled in their pods and served as an appetizer)…
You’d think they’d be a little more careful when editing an article about a lexicographer.
Here's a preview of the second of my pieces out this month, an overview of the emergence of hip-hop activism in the U.S. and its prospects for 2008 and beyond from Mother Jones. There's also a timeline...which reminds me to let you know that the book Born In The Bronx by the great Joe Conzo is finally out! More on that soon...for now check this:Jerry Quickley, hip-hop poet, performance artist, and war correspondent, can describe hell. It is a post-"liberated" Baghdad street, jammed with beat-up Brazilian and Czech sedans spewing trails of carbon monoxide, clouds of dust thickening in the 125-degree heat. He is riding shotgun in his Iraqi friend's car. "You have no traffic lights because there's no electricity. You have no police because they'd just be shot or blown up," he says. "You can barely breathe, traffic's going nowhere."
U.S. transport patrols fire into the air in an effort to clear traffic and ward off would-be bombers. Iraqi drivers desperately ram their clunkers into each other to get out of the way. "And while this is all going on," Quickley says, "this friend of mine is playing songs by 50 Cent."
The top-selling doo-ragged-and-body-oiled rapper—whose smash debut album was entitled "Get Rich Or Die Trying", and whose 2005 album "The Massacre" occasioned a multi-platform onslaught that included a book, a feature movie, a bloody videogame, a bling-encrusted line of watches, shoe and "enhanced water" ("hydrate or die trying") endorsements, not to mention tabloid headlines about a beef with a former protégé culminating in real-life shootings—warbles through the busted car stereo in a nasally drawl, "Many men wish death upon me."
"Sarte was right," thought Quickley at that moment. "This is 'No Exit.'"
For many, this is what hip-hop has become: an omnipresent grisly übermacho soundtrack from which there appears no exit. Tensions exploded this past spring after the April firing of shock jock Don Imus, who had called the largely African American Rutgers women's college basketball team "nappy-headed ho's". While Nike took out ads in the New York Times and on the web that read "Thank you, ignorance…Thank you for reminding us to think before we speak", Fox News commentators like Bill O'Reilly and John Gibson lectured hip-hop advocates. For two days, Oprah Winfrey and an angry studio audience cornered Russell Simmons, the rapper Common, and music industry executives.
For many, this is what hip-hop has become: an omnipresent grisly, übermacho soundtrack. Don Imus unleashed the latest hip-hop backlash when he noted that in calling the Rutgers women’s basketball team “nappy-headed hos” he was using an argot popularized by rappers. The frenzy of finger-pointing that followed culminated with the spectacle of Bill O’Reilly lecturing hiphop advocates on sexism and the “n word,” while Oprah berated Russell Simmons and other industry executives. The talk show circus aside, there’s plenty of evidence that people are weary of corporate rap. Only 59 million rap albums were sold in the United States last year, down from 90 million in 2001. According to the University of Chicago’s Black Youth Project report, youths—particularly minorities—overwhelmingly believe that rap videos portray women of color in a negative light.
Once a cacophony of diverse voices, the genre now looks like a monoculture whose product, not unlike high-fructose corn
syrup, is designed not to nourish, but simply to get us hooked on other products, from McDonald’s to Courvoisier.
Quickley, though, remains a true believer in hip-hop’s transformational potential. For him, it goes back to the summer of
1976, three years before the Sugarhill Gang’s breakthrough “Rapper’s Delight"...
Read the whole thing here.
Librarygirl's Halloween-Themed Reading List #3: Werewolves.
A specialized printer used to print Missouri driver's licenses was stolen and recovered.
It's a funny story, actually. Turns out the thief couldn't get access to the software needed to run the printer; a lockout on the control computer apparently thwarted him. When he called tech support, they tipped off the Secret Service.
On the one hand, this probably won't deter a more sophisticated thief. On the other hand, you can make pretty good forgeries with off-the-shelf equipment.
Seen last week in Paris, near République:
A piece of street art (made out of stickers) that indicates cardinal directions.
I know it’s not meant to be an urban sign but it’s a curious user-generated/DIY city elements. Standing around it for half an hour (I was waiting for a friend there), it was funny to see people avoiding walking on it: the status of the sign was higher than expected.
Remarks by Daniel Lerch, Author of Post Carbon Cities: A Guidebook on Peak Oil and Global Warming for Local Governments.
Is New York City prepared for global warming and peak oil? What will happen to the local economy when oil reaches $150 a barrel? How will global warming affect the regional water supply? How should we plan for transportation, land use, and public safety while facing huge uncertainties about energy and climate?
You'll learn:
- how peak oil and global warming and creating new challenges of uncertainty for all cities
- how “early actor” cities in the U.S. and Canada have already started already responding
- what immediate steps NYC should take
- what’s important for long-term planning
It looks like there are a lot of people writing about the UI changes in Leopard. Everyone has their own opinion, which is fine. However, I think there is one major misperception about successful UI design: some of the most significant elements are not easily measurable...
It’s that time of year again, Halloween!
I know we get a good mixture of kids and adults here at PokeFarm so why not leave a comment and tell everyone about your plans (and costume) for Halloween.
Will you be carving pumpkins? Going to a costume party? Tell us because we want to know.
Me? As the dad of the house it is normally my job to stay home and hand out the candy. I did carve a pumpkin tonight.
Let me tell all the other dads out there something very important. A Dremel will help you carve the pumpkin faster but you will also end up making a huge mess and those little bits of pumpkin that hit the floor dry harder than concrete!
Yes, I carved an Electrode out of a pumpkin for Halloween. Now, you might think that it is lame or uninspired but I have to tell you that shaving the top half of that pumpkin down with a Dremel was a very messy affair. I had pumpkin guts all over myself and the floor.
When you use the Dremel the pumpkin tends to liquify beneath you. This results in a very fine orange mist covering everything.
There he is in all his glory. I did go back and do a little more shaving to fix that one dark patch.
John Edwards has reportedly won the endorsement of the SEIU local in New Hampshire, completing a near-sweep of endorsements from the SEIU chapters.
Edwards had been unable to secure the endorsement of the national SEIU, but has really nailed down the next best thing. Thanks to the endorsements in Iowa and now New Hampshire, locals supporting other candidates won't be able to participate in the Democratic races in those states.
I recently blogged about toolbar buttons for Leopard's Finder (for opening in TextMate and some other useful scripts).
Today, I spent some more time fiddling with the buttons. I added the brighter line below the buttons and made the corners transparent, so the buttons look better when depressed and inactivated (as they will be in Time Machine). They don't match the "real" toolbar icons fully: e.g. the brighter line, not just the icon proper, will darken when depressed and inactivated, but I don't think you can get around that. The built-in toolbar icons are likely something else than
.icnsfiles.I updated the previous posts with the slightly improved icons. I also figured I would share the template I made, in case someone wants to make their own.
Photoshop file: leopard-toolbar-button.psd.
Note that the text layer has an outer glow layer effect, to approximate the etched look. (I'm sure someone can improve upon this. Please do share.)
Edit that file, then Save For Web as PNG-24 with transparency.
Open
/Developer/Applications/Utilities/Icon Composer.app. Icon Composer comes with the Developer Tools on your Leopard disk. Install if you didn't already. The entire set of Developer Tools amounts to several gigabytes, but hopefully you can pick-and-choose if you don't want the rest.
Drag your icon to the "32" (32 * 32 pixels) field. Select "Use for this size only" when prompted.
Now, just save and you'll have an icon.
See my earlier post for how to get the icon in your script's belly.
Today on the internet, otherwise-sane and grown-up individuals are arguing over "Maka-Maka," "Hulu," and more reasonably, but no less astoundingly user-hostile, "Leopard." Where's the other party?
Remember condoms? They were these things people used to prevent the spread of STDs. They are very useful to those who choose to swing. Especially if you Parlez-vous Telugu. I wish President Reagan (God, those two words STILL sound so wrong together!) had run these ads back in the '80s. Might still have some good friends around. Catchy tune.
Nice posters by Accept & Proceed here which make nice eye candy out of possibly mundane statistics.
A nice write-up in The Washington Post yesterday about Brijit, a start-up that hopes to make finding good magazine articles an easier task by creating a site that posts abstracts and ratings:
Brijit, Brosowsky said, aims to be "everyone's best-read friend."
Now on Brijit are summations of articles in current issues of GQ, Wired, Mother Jones, ESPN the Magazine, the Economist, Smithsonian and more than 50 other magazines. Even if you never read the entire article, just scanning Brijit could make you the smartest person at your next cocktail party.
Call me 'mildly interested.' It's not a bad idea. And I agree with David Foster Wallace's great opening essay in this year's Best American Essays, & also with Jason's reaction to it: namely, that we need editors a lot more than we think & now more than ever.
But, between the actual magazines and the individual styles, tastes, and voices of the blogs and group blogs that I already read to find what I've missed, where's room for Brijit? Maybe Brijit will reach critical mass and become a single-stop clearing-house for bloggers with more specialized tastes? One thing they'll have to do for certain is expand their currently-limited scope: if you look at their source list, a large number of the journals and magazines from which this year's crop of Best American Essays came are missing--including many that do post their content online & without a paywall.
Wednesday, Nov. 7th from 5-7PM Mind over Media: Join Youth Channel on November 7th from 5-7PM in the MNN Open Studio (537 W. 59th btw. 10th & 11th Ave.) as we share our Media Literacy curriculum and lead an inspiring forum on new ideas & methods for media education. Free curriculum and resources available for all in attendance! Gain helpful insight from a youth perspective on effective means of incorporating media literacy into the classroom. Please RSVP to mariela@youthchannel.org or for more information contact our Education Coordinator Isabel at 212-757-2670 ext. 320.
You can always tell when a typeface designer is involved. Some unseen force summoned me across the room to this beautiful set of greeting cards, resplendent in rich stochastic color, and bearing a wonderful assortment of letterforms. The choice of typeface for the letter K was enough to identify their designer as a connoisseur: it's Sapphire, a rare and underestimated typeface by none other than Hermann Zapf (1953), and one of my personal favorites. The others in the series have their own stories, as I would soon learn from their designer: it's our very own Sara Soskolne, who designed them for Plum Press.
The P is modeled on a novelty face by Photo-Lettering, Inc. called Johnson Grafin Hedda, and the F and C are adapted from an 1884 set of French signpainter's specimen sheets titled Modèles de Lettres. In nice counterpoint to the luscious outside, inside each is an inscription set in our own H&FJ Didot font. The complete collection features eight cards, covering for a range of appropriate occasions; I'm stocking up on the Ks, in anticipation of future bad behavior. —JH
See the full collection at Plum Press.
PingMag rounds up popular characters on Japanese produce packages. Squash, mushrooms, cabbage, eggplant, oranges, and more are all graced by aww-inducing cartoon likenesses of themselves, sometimes clothed, sometimes sporting stylish hairdos, and mostly smiling.
This direct mail piece, which a source sent our way, was just dropped by the McCain campaign in South Carolina:
Note the pic of McCain as a young soldier -- a reminder that neither Rudy, Romney nor Thompson served in the military. The piece also makes an argument that the McCain campaign is seeking to make more and more often of late -- namely, that he's the only conservative who can beat Hillary. The idea obviously is to trump Rudy's electability argument by telling social conservatives (of which there are many in South Carolina) that in McCain they have someone who is equally well-positioned to win a general election and who is with them on their core issues.
However, as the McCain campaign argued in a recent internal strategy memo, the Rudy campaign has been making the claim for months now that he alone is the best candidate against Hillary. The memo even confesses that the Rudy campaign has successfully "convinced voters" that this is the case. So it remains to be seen whether the McCain camp can turn this around with stuff like this, or whether it's too late.
While working to solve problems with PT and this blog, I made some improvements to MT-Dispatch since version 1.4. I’ve decided to produce version 1.5 with the new changes, while I wait for the cluster to finish my simulations. (Ancestral selection graphs are cool!)
Download version 1.5.—View documentation.
Changes in this Release
- If PERL_UNICODE is set, MT-Dispatch will decode all CGI parameters under the assumption that they are UTF-8 strings. The parameter ‘file’ is skipped because it is used for uploading binary data.
- After a worker is finished serving the CGI page, it will run any waiting periodic tasks. This allows one to use the background publishing queue without running the periodic daemon.
- The default maximum requests is now 100.
- If PERL_FCGI_LOG is not set, stderr will be used instead. (Suggested by Hirotaka Ogawa)
There is an ice cream shop en route to the elementary school I used to attend called the Bubbling Brook. We used to stop there on many an afternoon, the entire carpool spilling out of the minivan to line up for what "The Bub" did best: rainbow sherbet (heavy on the raspberry), or a chocolate-vanilla twist with chocolate dip, which inevitably cracked and dripped down faces and shirts and onto leather-upholstered backseats. But the Bub was a seasonal place, and I can still taste the bitterness of the disappointmentjust as clearly as I can the sweetness of that sherbertof the day when we drove by only to find that it had closed for the winter, the windows through which the ice cream passed firmly shuttered against the long, cold months ahead.
I'm more of a mocha-chip girl these days, but I still feel a little twinge of sadness around this time of year at the sight of so many shops shutting down until spring. When it comes to ice cream, why must we be fair-weather friends? Surely I'm not the only one who would splurge on a cone on a snowy day or stop in for a pint to eat later, under the covers with a mug of hot chocolate. And think of all the missed seasonal flavor opportunities: cranberry-gingersnap or kumquat-eggnog swirl.
That's why Alexis Miesen and Jennie Dundas are my new heroes. They dared to open their organic, locally produced ice cream shop, Blue Marble, this month. And while they may not have a soft-serve machine to dispense those twists of my youth, they do serve fair-trade coffee and yummy treats from Baked. I stopped in for a cup of butter-pecan earlier this week. Silky and rich, with a decadent, nutty crunch, it was the perfect complement to the crisp fall afternoon. I didn't quite finish it, though, and left the rest in my boyfriend's freezer. When I came back the next day it was gone. Oh, the agony!
I'm considering this post an expression of my gratitude to Blue Marble, and also a plea to the Bubbling Brook on behalf of the students at my alma matter to stay open year-round. If you'd like to add your own shout outs, please do so. At Serious Eats, we're always on the lookout for noteworthy ice cream shopsno matter what the weather. And if you've got any brilliant ideas for cold-season flavors (what would go perfectly scooped over a slice of fruitcake?) tack those on as well.
About the author: Lucy Baker is a graduate student in the writing program at Sarah Lawrence College. Before returning to school to pursue an MFA, she was an assistant cookbook editor at HarperCollins. She lives in Brooklyn and is currently obsessed with all things fennel.
Took a quick trip with Sammy to the Bahamas. Hope to be all caught up with new posts by morning.
Marc and Sara
The team behind popular OS X chat client Adium has talked a bit about its future plans: audio/video chat is in the works for the next major release.
THE GRAVEL/TANCREDO MEMORIAL NO-SHOT-IN-BLOODY-HELL DIVISION
30. Devil Rays – The scary part is that they might not need him.
29. Royals – No budget for it, and Alex Gordon remains their most valuable long-term keeper at 3B.
28. Twins – Never big spenders, they’re likely moving in the opposite direction this winter.
27. Pirates – New ownership might theoretically be looking to make a splash, but it’s hard to imagine A-Rod settling in here unless his name turns up in the Mitchell Commission report.
26. A’s – I’m sure that Billy Beane has entertained the thought, but Eric Chavez blocks him, ownership won’t pay for him, and there’s no long-term gameplan associated with him.
25. Rangers – Extraordinarily hard to imagine. Even ignoring all of the baggage, Hank Blalock and Michael Young are two of their assets.
24. Mariners – Little chance of a reunion tour. Between Beltre and Betancourt, they have a cost-effective if not spectacular left side of the infield.
23. Rockies – He’d sure get to 756+ quickly here, but the current regime has shown little interest in spending money on big free agent talent, they’re very concerned about clubhouse culture, and they’d have to part ways with Garrett Atkins.
22. Reds – No a priori reason that it couldn’t work, but there’s been little indication that they’re willing to increase payroll even a little, let alone a lot. Edwin Encarnacion is an asset, so Rodriguez would probably need to play shortstop. Still in pigs-could-fly territory here.
THE PAUL/KUCINICH MEMORIAL NO-SHOT-IN-HELL DIVISION
21. Marlins – You can construct arguments where this makes sense, but very unlikely in practice.
20. Brewers – See above.
THE McCAIN/BIDEN MEMORIAL MAYBE-FOUR-YEARS-AGO DIVISION
19. Indians – Not really in line with their organizational philosophy, but they could use a third basemen. If they shocked everyone and went in this direction, they could be 105-wins good.
18. Diamondbacks – With Jeff Moorad’s money and a need for offense, it might get a passing thought, but attendance has been a little sluggish, and it would mean punting on either Mark Reynolds or Stephen Drew.
17. Orioles – Possible money grab destination a year ago, but rhetoric from new COO Andy MacPhail suggests that Orioles are starting to wake up and smell the coffee and wean themselves from their haphazard spending days.
THE HUCKABEE/RICHARDSON MEMORIAL MAYBE-IF-THEY-WIN-IOWA DIVISION
16. Braves – Not the worst idea, since Chipper Jones badly needs to move back to the outfield, but the plan seems to be for more piecemeal increases in payroll.
15. Blue Jays – An underrated fit – Rodriguez could play shortstop in 2008 and then move back to third when Troy Glaus is sent packing – but word is that J.P. Ricciardi wants a quiet winter.
THE EDWARDS/THOMPSON MEMORIAL PLAUSIBLE-BUT-FADING DIVISION
14. Yankees – No indication that they were bluffing, and since A-Rod took a lot of free money from Tom Hicks off the table when he opted out of his contract, it’s hard to imagine them coming to agreement now if they couldn’t before.
13. Padres – All the California teams but the A’s are potential suitors, but the Padres are much stinger than is generally acknowledged about payroll. Becomes more plausible if A-Rod is willing to play second base.
12. Cubs – The sale of the club is likely to take longer than expected, as there are rumors that the Tribune’s deal with Sam Zell is in question, and as they look for non-Mark Cuban suitors to compete with John Canning’s bid. They’d also have to be willing to commit to A-Rod at shortstop for at least several seasons because of Aramis Ramirez’ contract. I’d be shocked if he signs here.
11. Red Sox – They’ll be great with or without him, and odds went way down after Boras’ F.U. to the Red Sox on Sunday.
THE ROMNEY/OBAMA MEMORIAL CHATTERING CLASSES DIVISION
10. Nationals – Dark horse. They may be looking to start spending like the big market club that they are, they certainly need a gate attraction to define the franchise, and A-Rod gets to stay in Acela territory. Would be more intriguing if they did not have Ryan Zimmerman, but if need be you could flip Zimmerman to short in a couple seasons.
9. Cardinals – In the near term, they need a shortstop, with the organization parting ways with David Eckstein. In the long term, they might have to resign themselves to the fact that Scott Rolen is becoming a sunk cost. This team draws like a big market club, and they could desperately use another high-impact bat, but becomes less likely with the direction they’ve gone in the GM position.
8. Tigers – Dave Dombrowski can be bold, and there’s the sense that Brandon Inge is part of the problem rather than part of the solution, but odds went way down after the Renteria trade.
7. White Sox – Between Reinsdorf, Williams, and Guillen, you have three personalities with a knack for surprising. Need is pretty strong too; Juan Uribe is probably on his way out and Joe Crede will likely be gone after ’08. But I don’t see it unless the bidding comes in a little cheaper than expected.
6. Astros – There’s really no incumbent at third base, they’re willing to spend money, and he probably gets them back into playoff contention. I doubt that A-Rod would want to return to Texas, but otherwise it makes some sense.
THE GORE/GINGRICH/BLOOMBERG MEMORIAL MAKES-SENSE-WHEN- YOU-STARE-AT-IT-FOR-TOO-LONG DIVISION
5. Mets – Rodriguez would have to be convinced to play second base for a year – he could conceivably move to first once Carlos Delgado’s contract expires in a year’s time – but $32m/year plus New York endorsement money plus a chance to stick it to the Yankees could do the trick. I dismissed this scenario at first but find it more plausible at second glance.
4. Phillies – Possible mystery team? Their third base situation in 2007 was one of the biggest disasters in baseball, they have more money than they pretend to have, they’re right on the playoff bubble, and there’s some aesthetic appeal to fielding a world-class infield of Rodriguez, Rollins, Utley and Howard. Perhaps the best fit in baseball on paper.
THE MONDALE/DOLE MEMORIAL DEFAULT OPTION DIVISION
3. Giants – San Francisco fans are notoriously tolerant, they could use any offensive help they can get, and Barry Bonds’ departure leaves some cash in their wallets. But this team is probably not going to the playoffs with or without A-Rod, so this is the fallback alternative if the contending clubs don’t bite.
THE CLINTON/GIULIANI MEMORIAL RUNAWAY FRONTRUNNER DIVISION
2. Dodgers – Means, motive, opportunity, a GM and ownership that seem determined to prove themselves, and now Joe Torre at the helm. If A-Rod is spotted house hunting in Silver Lake, look out.
1. Angels – Arte Moreno feigns disinterest, but this team needs a premium hitter and we’ve been hearing all winter that they’re prepared for a payroll blitz.
Not for me, for a while anyhow. It turns out that Lightroom has difficulties, and not only is Java 6 missing, apparently Java 5 is damaged. The two highest-value programs I run on this puppy are NetBeans and Lightroom, so this kind of hits me where I live. As it stands now, the Mac is generally speaking a superb server-side developers’ platform, because it’s Unix under the covers and because all the UI and housekeeping is decent and Just Works, not subtracting time from what matters. But you know, the largest single group of server-side software developers still lives in the Java world, and they won’t be going to Leopard until Leopard comes to them. Not, perhaps, a big demographic. But an influential one I think.
I've never been the face-paint donning, foam-hands clad, spectator-sport enthusiast. Prior to living in Boston, I had as much interest in watching a paced game of baseball as I did waiting for a virus-ridden computer to start up. But a few visits to Fenway Park quickly fixed that.
For Bostonians, being a Red Sox fan is a cult vow, turning even the most left-brained, emotionally stable citizens into unflinchingly faithful and superstitious beings who don the "B" on their dusty caps as if it were a red badge of courage. A telling instance is the fact that, as late as the night of game four in this season's World Series, Boston city officials were afraid to pre-plan any victory parades, so as not to jinx the team that has caused an 86-year-old heartbreak for so many.
I sadly can't make the city-wide parade that's being held today, but I look forward to experiencing it vicariously through my fellow fans on Flickr.
GO SOX!
Photos from oscalito, Big Dave Deluxe, Bill from Boston, cybersooz and KingVitaman.
Leopard wins this cat fight in 64-bit mode on an Intel Mac, but in 32-bit mode or on the PowerPC G5, Tiger performs better.
I’ve been sworn to secrecy about it, but I’ve been using it for the past year, and it’s AWESOME.
Eye-Fi is new. It adds wifi to any digital camera.
Your photos get uploaded straight to Flickr, AND downloaded to your computer when it’s next online. $99 gets you 2GB of SD storage and antenna-free, cable-free, subscription fee-free wifi heaven.
Buy it now at the Photojojojo store! (We’re psyched to be the first to ship it.)
UPDATE: We’re gonna offer an SD to CF card adapter that makes it work with any camera that takes CF cards. Probably next week. (We’re testing.)
It used to be that you had to venture below the grime-caked pylons of the Manhattan Bridge, to a scene more reminiscent of Luoyang than of the Lower East Side, in order to catch a cheap bus ride between New York and Washington, DC. Even now at the intersection of East Broadway and Forsyth St, ticket hawkers scream out destinations in thick Cantonese accents--“DC, DC, DC!” “Philly, Philly!”--and grab the arms of passers-by toting luggage. Loading queues often disintegrate into a Hobbesian struggle to nab untaken seats.
. . .
Most recently, a Marriott executive founded DC2NY, a service between Washington and New York that guarantees customers seats if booked online and charges only slightly more than the Chinatown buses (a $40 round-trip versus $35). It also offers free bottles of water and Wi-Fi internet access. The “luxury” bus carrier has more than doubled its operation since its inaugural trip this summer. Watch as its older rivals start copying its perks."The Chinatown express: Innovation brings emulation," The Economist, October 27, 2007
More
- "How to Get Into, Around, and Out Of Washington, DC" - from TheCapitol.Net
- DC2NY - "The Ultimate Bus Travel Experience" [Yelp]
Steve Wozniak has spoken with Laptop Magazine regarding the iPhone, user interface, and innovation. And whenever Woz speaks, we listen.
If you haven't seen them yet (and chances are you have), Jessica Hagy's index cards are little marvels of wit and wisdom. They've also netted her world-wide acclaim and a book deal with Penguin. Her book, Indexed, comes out next year. While she's not the first blogger with a book deal, I love her cards so much I asked her to chat with me about how she started blogging--as well as how her blog got her a book deal and more. But first, here's one of my all-time favorite Jessica Hagy index cards:
JT: So, you're sitting around at work one day saying, "Yeah, I am like Roz Chast--but only her if maybe she worked as a McKinsey consultant, and, yes, I am going to start a blog posting my index cards, dammit!" Or did it start out a little differently?JH: I read somewhere that 'every writer needs a blog' but I didn't want to do one of those "Here's what I had for breakfast. Here's what I did at school" blogs. I'd had a few really lame advertising jobs, and was going back to school, and I felt like I had to do something--anything--that was remotely creative so my head wouldn't explode. I never thought anyone would find the thing, actually. It was just my little, goofy project.
JT: Your cards are a run-away hit on the blogosphere, including their regular feature in the Freakonomics blog: did it take a while to build up? What other opportunities have grown out of your blog? Are you a full-time 3x5-er now?
JH: About a week after I posted the first batch last August, somebody linked the blog to Metafilter. Whoever you are, thank you! That's how my agent (it's still strange to me that I have an honest-to-god agent) found me, and from there, it just sort of took off.
I'm working on the full-timing. The Indexed book comes out on Feb 28th (one day before leap day). Indexed was a Webby honoree and is on a bunch of "best blogs' lists. Right now, the cards are on Freakonomics and run in Plenty Magazine. They ran in GOOD magazine, on the BBC Magazine Online, and JibJab commissioned a bunch of them. Current TV is going to film me drawing about a dozen of them and turn that into TV interstitials.
I've had a few offers to sell the whole thing, but none seemed to be great fits. Syndication is the next thing we're going after.
I'm super, super, super lucky.
JT: It's blog-2-book madness these days--how did your book come about?
JH: My incredibly cool editor at Pengiun emailed me about turning the blog into a book in February. I forwarded his email to my agent. They talked to each other. I talked to them. And off we went. I love the Internet.
JT: I can't wait for your book--but in the meantime, I hope whoever you get as a publicist uses this video of your work. How did that come about?
JH: That was an email from Clemens Kogler, an Austrian filmmaker, just saying he liked the stuff and could he use it in a film. That sounded fun to me, and the result was Le Grand Content. It was featured on the front page of YouTube on Superbowl Sunday, and having worked in advertising for years and never gotten a decent TV spot produced, that felt like a creative victory of sorts, to have that show up there when it did.JT: Finally, care to leave us with a card about blogs?
JH:
OK, comments are turned on: be interesting or nice or both.
(Comment on this)
The University of California Social Documentation Master of Arts program is seeking students for a two year master of arts degree in documentary production and research. Students interested in social issues who possess a four year degree and a documentary production background in film-video, audio, photography, creative ethnography, museum installation, or new media documentary are encouraged to apply. The deadline for the current admissions cycle will be January 15th, 2008. For more information about the program, please visit http://communitystudies.ucsc.edu/graduate.
OK, Joel Turnipseed here. I'll be doing some of the usual curatorial work that Jason does so well, but I also want to take this week to have a look at how blogs are changing how we create, disseminate, and critique our culture these days. In a world in which an Eau Claire Area Teen can post something to Digg and bring as much attention to it as an article in The New Yorker or The Atlantic (both of whom are heavy into blogging themselves these days), this seems like a good thing to do. For better or worse, blogs seem to be the new dispensation. But what, really, are they good for--or: what are they really good for--and what don't they do very well? Helping me out this week will be:
Jessica Hagy, blogger and author of forthcoming Indexed
Douglas Wolk, music and comics critic and author of Reading Comics
Ted Genoways, poet and editor of The Virginia Quarterly Review
Yochai Benkler, law professor and author of The Wealth of Networks
Steven Berlin Johnson, outside.in founder and author of Emergence and The Ghost Map
Rebecca Skloot, journalist, critic, and NBCC board member
Cory Doctorow, Boing Boing blogger and author of, most-recently, OverclockedI'll be posting short interviews with these fine folks throughout the week.
Mini street art seen last week in Amsterdam, a little door+street number plate that we encountered while wandering around.
Yet another thing to add in the list of objects stuck on street material. Beyond classical stickers and graffiti, the mini-doors is a quite intriguing move.
Amanda at the Etsy store butterflyblue is making these dress-patterned-themed cards and offering them to people who buy patterns from her shop (and use the code "Dressaday" when doing so).
Getting sweet handmade bonuses like this is one of my favorite things about buying from Etsy shops or on Ebay or from small websites. I love it when the packing slip is an old postcard, or a piece of construction paper rubber-stamped with the name of the store, or a cut-up magazine page, and not something printed from a laser printer straight out of Microsoft Office's "Invoice" template.
If you're looking for something to buy to get the card, may I suggest this?
Isn't this the dress the über-competent 1950s mom would wear? I think so ... casual, yet trim and neat, and with that lovely collar. It would make a great summer office dress in pique -- cool for the street, but easy to throw a cardigan over in the Land of Air-Conditioning. And when someone wearing this calls your full name (first, last AND middle) out across the neighborhood, you know she means business.
Source: Office of the New Jersey State Climatologist Click to EnlargeGov. Corzine's appearance this week at an international conference on climate change comes at a time when many of us are scratching our heads about the weather. It hasn't felt...
It didn’t take long.
Joe Torre has been named manager of the Los Angeles Dodgers in what is whispered to be a “giant shakeup” of the Dodgers organization. Peter Abraham of the Journal-News had the scoop late Monday, including the news that Don Mattingly would continue as Torre’s bench coach, venturing outside of pinstripes for the first time in his career. Mattingly’s son, Preston Mattingly, is in the Dodgers organization, making the transition easier. It also appears that Torre will bring hitting coach Kevin Long as well. You remember Long, the guy who Alex Rodriguez credits for his success this season. No word yet on other coaching positions, though Mariano Duncan might be able to stay at first.
Behind the scenes, Grady Little was fired mostly for not being Joe Torre. There will be talk of clubhouse problems, but Little was undermined in the clubhouse by ownership. The more interesting news will be when the front office maneuvering plays out. GM Ned Colletti, AGM Kim Ng, and development guru Logan White have all been rumored as targets in the shifting sands of the Dodgers hierarchy. The Torre move is clearly coming from the McCourt family as well as consigliere Tommy Lasorda. If player moves - really big player moves - are made shortly, we’ll know that the purse strings now have become puppet strings.
Is there more pent-up news ready to break after the World Series embargo? There’s definitely rumblings. I’m expecting news in St. Louis and Chicago as soon as Tuesday.
There are now some news reports that the Braves will be picking up some of Renteria’s salary. How much money is unclear; the Atlanta Journal Constitution article says “it wasn’t as much as the $8 million that Boston agreed to pay when it traded [Renteria] to the Braves”. Still, even if it’s just a few million, it could be the equivalent of the “B- or C- level prospect” that I implied the Tigers should have gotten back in this deal.
I’ve also gotten a couple of e-mails about my claim that “Detroit is a market that appears to be quite sensitive to team quality”. I have a pet theory about this, which is that if you go into Detroit to see a ballgame, you’re there to see the ballgame. You sure as hell aren’t going there as a tourist, and unless you’re a contractor for General Motors or a candidate in the Republican caucus, you very probably are not going there as a business traveler. Contrast this to a city like Chicago. On any given day at Wrigley Field, I would guess that there are a couple thousand tourists in from Iowa, Wisconsin, Indiana and downstate Illinois that are making a weekend out of their trip to Chicago, perhaps a thousand convention attendees, and maybe another thousand or two business travelers that are being wined and dined by their clients. This type of fan is probably less sensitive to the quality of the game itself than someone for whom baseball is the main attraction.
I could not find any comprehensive data on travel and tourism dollars in different US cities, but I did find a pretty good substitute, which is “Accommodation and Food Services Sales” as calculated by the U.S. Census Bureau. This category serves as proxy for a whole host of factors that might be desirable to a baseball club, such as tourist dollars, business travel, service industry infrastructure, and disposable income. Here are those numbers in each major league city, as of 1997:
New York $11,009 Los Angeles $4,563 Chicago $4,482 Houston $3,399 San Francisco $3,283 Washington $2,943 San Diego $2,610 Dallas $2,354 Boston $2,050 Phoenix $2,009 Philadelphia $1,692 Atlanta $1,605 Seattle $1,552 Denver $1,335 Kansas City $1,043 Minneapolis $885 Baltimore $850 Tampa $783 Miami $765 St. Louis $687 Pittsburgh $677 Cleveland $674 Milwaukee $615 Detroit $575 Cincinnati $564 Oakland $436You should notice that there’s quite a strong correlation between this figure and baseball attendance; the only real strong outlier is St. Louis. Overall, the correlation between these numbers and average per-game attendance since 2001 is .57, which is stronger than the .53 that I got in the much more rigorous study of market sizes that I concluded this May.
“Programmers always seem to think the language they're currently using provides exactly the right amount of abstraction for the task at hand, with anything less dynamic being considered barbaric, and anything more dynamic seen as crazy and unsafe.”
- John Siracusa
While in Paris, I hooked up a fellow DJ and all-around good guy, Just Dizle.
This is his son, Lynden.
18 months old.. and already killin it.
Them 2 Japanese kids better watch out.
Subway map geeks rejoice:
Transit Maps of the World is the first and only comprehensive collection of historic and current maps of every rapid-transit system on earth. Using glorious, colorful graphics, Mark Ovenden traces the history of mass transit-including rare and historic maps, diagrams, and photographs, some available for the first time since their original publication. Transit Maps is the graphic designer's new bible, the transport enthusiast's dream collection, and a coffee-table essential for everyone who's ever traveled in a city.
Found out about this from Boing Boing, where Cory has a quick review.
(More about this book...)
Most Leopard developer documentation is not currently available on the main ADC site. However, you can get to much of within the Leopard Dev Center. Previously, this was only available to paid members, but most or all of the content is now available with a free online account. Go here and click "Join Now"...
Harris Salat of The Japanese Food Report shares his detailed notes on the classic preparation of rice according to master chef Yoshio Maruyama of Kyoto. " Preparing rice in Japan is well, more than just preparing rice. Cooking this grain the traditional way reflects a sense of ajiwai, the ability to get the most out of the natural flavor of a particular ingredient - the essence of Japanese cuisine."
Thanks to Word’s AutoSummarize function:
Leopard's new look Folders Tiger folder icon Leopard folder icon Leopard special folder icons Leopard docked special folders Behold, the Leopard Dock. The Leopard menu bar. Leopard's visual scorecard 64-bit GPR size 32 bits 64 bits 32 bits 64 bits % file Xcode • Asynchronous file system notifications Enter Leopard's FSEvents framework. Core Animation Core Animation So what's changed in Leopard? Leopard supports cryptographically signed applications. Icon view in Leopard Now Leopard. Docked folders in Leopard Docked folder stack Docked folder grid Time Machine Time Machine icon Time line Time Machine internals % cd Backups.backupdb/Leopard/2007-10-18-103601/Leopard\ Demo Good show, Apple. Thanks, Apple.
Posted by Brad Taylor, Software Engineer and "Spam Czar"
When Gmail's spam filters are working perfectly, no one talks to us anti-spam engineers. But as soon as something goes wrong, our users, our friends, and even our Google colleagues who use Gmail for their corporate mail are sure to tell us. That's just the way we like it. Spam is not something people should grow numb to and accept as a fact of life. We *want* people to complain. That's the only way things get better.
Due in large part to all the great feedback we get, things are better. We're keeping more spam out of your inbox than ever before, so more and more, you can use Gmail for things you enjoy without even realizing that the spam filter is there most of the time. It's not too different from driving a convertible down the freeway with the top down, with the wind blowing through your hair and no traffic jams to destroy the mood. Now, I'm not saying we're perfect, but the really good news is that it seems like spammers are finally starting to get discouraged. Attempts to spam Gmail users have been leveling off over the last year and more recently, even declining slightly. We need your help clicking on the "Report Spam" button, but through continuous improvement we are approaching the world we all want to live in.As much as we don't want you to even think about spam, people are naturally curious and ask questions such as "where does spam come from?", "who buys the shoddy stuff spammers advertise?" and "how do you catch spam?" We're engineers, though, not forensic experts or economists, so while we can only speculate about the first two questions, we can talk authoritatively about the last one -- spam-catching. To that end, we've put together a video explaining how our spam filters work:
Now if we could only get a "Report Traffic" button in our cars ...
I’ve just joined the board of directors of Sanrio Digital based in Hong Kong, which among other things does the online stuff for Hello Kitty. It’s a joint venture between Sanrio and Typhoon Games which is run by my good friend Yat Siu. A full press release is on their blog.
I am now reachable at joi (at) hellokitty.com. ;-)
UPDATE: You can see the various services we are providing already at Sanriotown. You can get your free Hello Kitty email address there too.
Comment - TrackBack
How can I use spreadsheets to answer some of my many questions about the world?
- =GoogleLookup("life"; "meaning")
- =GoogleLookup("God"; "existence")
- =GoogleLookup("Beatles"; "iTunes launch date")
- =GoogleLookup("one hand clapping"; "sound level")
- etc.
(I'd love your comments on this.)
Project Orcon was a WWII-era effort to find a non-jammable guidance system for missiles; pigeons were one of the things they tried. Loaded into a missile, the pigeons were to tap on the image of the target to correct the missile's trajectory.
Trainee pigeons were started out in the primary trainer pecking at slowly moving targets. They were rewarded with corn for each hit and quickly learned that good pecking meant more food. Eventually pigeons were able to track a target jumping back and forth at five inches per second for 80 seconds, without a break. Peck frequency turned out to be four per second, and more than 80 percent of the pecks were within a quarter inch of the target. The training conditions simulated missile-flight speeds of about 400 miles per hour.
More information at Wikipedia, including some interesting see alsos: bat bomb and anti-tank dog. (thx, dan)
(link)
Looking for a modern-day address in Brooklyn, stymied again by the New York Times’ newly-opened archives ancienne. This bit of a cartographic acid poetry is comin’ to you straight outta 1894.
(This is a regular series, see previous entries on Kuhn, Whyte, Buxton, Kidder, Whyte again, Levinson, Edgerton, and a recent name-check from Adam)
Where The Suckers Moon is Randall Rothenberg's account of Subaru's search for an advertising agency in the early 1990s and the campaign that resulted. It traces the strange roots of the car company, diverts into histories of the advertising industry, communications, semiotics, and psychology, and follows the creation of a campaign from its first creative development through the trenches of production and out to public release.
The first half of the book is largely historical, and doesn't provide a lot of quotable material for these excerpts. That's not to say it isn't good reading, just doesn't chunk well.
Reading this book reminded me of the blessing and curse that is YouTube. A blessing, because many of the early 1990s ads described in the narrative are readily available on Google's monster video sharing site, such as Tibor Kalman's work for Pepe Jeans. This ad has lurked in my subconscious for the past 17 years. A curse, because anything of recent interest is inevitably scrubbed from YouTube at a rapidly accelerating clip. Exhibit A is my post on the London 2012 identity I love so dearly, whose linked videos have been pulled for bullshit copyright reasons. I have a half a mind to write the minimal amount of Python and Actionscript it would take to mirror posted videos and keep them as presentable as they are now - the hive mind shared memory functions of sites like YouTube and OiNK are as deeply valuable as the communicative functions of the recorded media they store and share.
Anyway, on to the excerpts.
Page 211, on pomo:
Beyond placing emphasis in filmmaking technique, Wieden & Kennedy's Lou Reed ad helped foster the development of a postmodern sensibility in the advertising industry. In the minds of the youngsters who were entering the business, advertising no longer had to be advertising, or entertainment. It could be, in Larry Bridge's phrase, "metacommentary": art that explicated, through irony, camp, iconic references or self-reference, the commercial itself and the consumer culture of which it was a part. It was a living, evolutionary answer to Walter Benjamin's denial that art could exist in the modern era - "that which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art."Page 212-213, on pomo some more:
It may have looked like "metacommentary", but semioticians term it a "false metacommunication" because, through its production techniques, it pointed the viewer in a wrong direction - toward the preferred interpretation of freedom and license - in order to mask its covert purpose, selling mass-manufactured goods, which it did by the implicit linkage of the product with the message of independence. Robert Goldman and Steve Papson, sociologists who have studied this school of advertising, refer to it, with good reason, as "the postmodernism that failed."Page 225, on conflicted creative direction:
And the truth was this: Jerry Cronin, the new creative director on Subaru of America's advertising account, despised cars. ... "I always hated cars," Jerry said one day in his office. "I didn't own a car until I was twenty-eight. We had no money when I was growing up. We always had these old Ramblers. I always heard the old man complaining about cars. Every time he left the house, he never knew whether the car would get him home." ... "People are far too attached to their cars. I want them to see that cars are a hunk of metal. Automotive advertising is the biggest lie of all time. You want to live better, look better - buy a grill, go to the gym!"Page 230, on art direction influences:
Jerry was thinking. What he was looking for was inspiration. He had already decided that the look he wanted derived from the heroic Social Realism prevalent in public and commercial art during the 1930s - the "dawn-of-the-Machine-Age" style popularized in friezes by the Works Progress Administration and photographs in Life. That this look was also prevalent in the hortatory art of both Hilter's Germany and Stalin's Soviet Union did not escape the agency men. Larry sent his assistant to a local video store to pick up a copy of Leni Riefenstahls's Olympiad, a celebration of Nazi power, to review it for cinematographic stimulation.Page 301, on Chait/Day and fighting clients:
Watching the agency win, and build, Apple Computer and Yamaha motorcycles and other prestigious accounts taught Luhr the essential lessons of account management in the era of postmodern advertising. To do good work was the purpose of advertising, he learned. And good creative people didn't operate by the same rules by which, say, good bankers do. And clients don't always recognize the value of good creative work or good, quirky creative people, so an account exec had to be prepared to fight the client, anger the client, even risk dismissal or fire the client if the going got too debilitating.Page 309, on slow hiring:
Everything Wieden & Kennedy was grew out of a creative philosophy that required immersion in the convolutions of American culture, everything the agency could be depended on the collegial spirit of the men and women who filled its offices. Although hundreds of creatives at other agencies across the land would have overturned their lives for a chance to work, however briefly, at Wieden & Kennedy, Dan was not an easy mark. You can't just... just... hire people overnight! You have to talk to them, again and again and again, test them, tease them, scrutinize their work and their philosophies. Since it was difficult to schedule time with Dan (his insistence on approving everything that went on in the agency made him difficult to pin down) Wieden & Kennedy generally took months to hire even relatively junior copywriters and art directors. On the Subaru account, the delays took their toll.Page 328, on faith:
Faith, while hard won, is easily lost. It can be shaken by many things: misguided words, obstinacy, an inability to grow along with one's partner, suddenly seeing the partner through eyes unblinded by desire. Relationships, of course, are maintained by faith. No matter how fervently contemporary ad agencies insist that they are entertainers or artists, advertising is still founded on relationships. So in advertising, as in marriage, a loss of faith can be debilitating. It is the only quality, really, that binds a client to an agency.Page 415, on reading between the lines:
"And so this campaign really does explain the key features of the car," Walter said, "in a very simpleminded way, not unlike the way Lexus is doing it." (Features: That meant Wieden & Kennedy had learned to talk about engineering. Simpleminded: That showed the agency was not striving to be creative. Lexus: That proved the agency had learned to sell by overselling.) "It hits on something we learned in the research: Impreza considerers need to be sold." (Research: That meant the work wasn't the invention of artsy types. Sold: That spoke again to the agency's new willingness to huckster.) "It also has a new tactical element, a videotape that we'll send consumers and ask them to respond to, via toll-free number." (Tactical: That showed Wieden & Kennedy was ready to deploy gimmicks. Toll-free number: The kind of gimmicks used by the big, boring agencies in New York.)Page 427, in conclusion:
Subaru of America had learned the lesson of advertising. Advertising did not work by entertaining or assaulting the intellect of its audience, as the company's previous agencies had believed. Nor did it work through subliminal manipulation, as so many Americans, ever on the lookout for conspiracies, misguidedly thought. Instead, advertising, as the great ad man Bruce Barton had acknowledged decades before, was "something big, something splendid, something which goes deep down into an institution and gets hold of the soul of it." To succeed, advertising cannot seek to invent a new soul. Instead, it must reinforce and redirect the existing image. It must serve as a form of mythology, providing the corporation's various and often competing constituencies - of which consumers are only one of many - heroes, villains, principles, rules of conduct and stories with which they can rally the faithful to remain true to the cause. Only then, with luck and effort, can they win new converts.
I just submit my first module: SQL::Bibliosoph - A SQL statement library (with prepared statement and bind paramenters support). What a great day!!!Read more of this story at use Perl.
“There are going to be a lot of evangelicals willing to vote for a Democrat because there are 40 million people without health insurance and a Democrat is going to do something about that.” - sweet christ let's hope so
bookmark this on del.icio.us - posted by stamen to politics religion nytimes - more about this bookmark...
Taking a break from all the collaborating, originally uploaded by George.
Here are some highlights of the happenings in the Movable Type world for the week before Halloween.
Read/WriteWeb upgraded to Movable Type 4 - congratulations Richard and team! A tip of the hat to the Media Temple team as well for their expert help in the upgrade and migration process. The (mt) people really know their stuff - they helped to isolate some significant performance enhancements that will have a lasting impact for all MT4 users starting with the next release of Movable Type.
Todd of Geek News Central got frustrated with Movable Type's podcasting support. We listened. And thanks to his feedback, there is now a more complete solution for podcasters on Movable Type. His feedback will also result in other changes being made to the core to make Movable Type an even better media blogging platform. Thank you Todd.
The Movable Type team is gearing up for a private beta of the Movable Type Community Solution, and the public debut of its functionality powering parts of MovableType.org.
In some shameless self promotion, I recently added YouTube and Flickr support to Media Manager, extending the plugin for the first time beyond books and DVDs from Amazon. One of the design goals of Movable Type 4 was to make it as easy as possible for Movable Type to bootstrap just about any 3rd party or proprietary asset management system - Media Manager (licensed under the GPL) goes a long way to provide developers with an example of how to do just that.
Chris Hall, Movable Type's lead QA engineer who has an almost freakish knowledge of just about everything, not to mention being one one of the best QA engineers I have ever met, wrote a plugin of his own: MTBooter makes generating large amounts of test data for a blog a snap. A very handy tool for developers and QA engineers alike.
Mark Carey of mt-hacks released a new version of his wonderful Visitor Stats plugin. This plugin reminds me why I think Mark is one of the best Movable Type plugin developers out there by taking advantage of more and more of Movable Type's plugin APIs with each release. His latest release makes extensive use of dashboard widgets giving administrators greater insight into their blogs' visitors and where they are coming from, and even has a tiny graphical stats widget to display publicly on your blog.
The California State Archivist reports on the status of archives, museums in affected fire areas in California via the California State Library Blog. [thanks anarchivist]
Theo Epstein is a rock star. Maybe not the way he’d most like to be, but here, with his team a win away from their second World Championship in four years, the man is a rock star.
Three hours before the game, Epstein held court from the Sox dugout, taking questions from four, then 14, then 24 writers crowding around him as if he were Warren Buffett starting sentences with, “If it were my money….” Notepads and recorders filled with the man’s thoughts on his team, his young stars, the lefthander making his World Series debut, how this run is different from 2004. He deflected questions about impending free agent Curt Schilling and the apparently displaced Coco Crisp, keeping the focus on tonight, on this World Series, expertly bobbing and weaving, calm in the eye of the storm. It was odd to think that he’s not even been in the job five years, yet has ascended to among the top of his field in seniority, in success, and in his handling of the latter.
I’ve got a great job, one I love, but it was hard to not stand there and be just a little jealous.
What makes the inevitable second championship more interesting is that this team, even more than the 2004 one, is Epstein’s creation. So much of the core comes from the “$100 million development machine” he talked of creating. The signature superstar is David Ortiz, a bargain-basement free agent who grew into a legend, and there are eight-figure contracts throughout the roster. Look closer, though, and you see a homegrown left side of the infield, the best closer in the AL, a center fielder drafted a shade over two years ago, a Game Four starter, a setup reliever…a team that’s the product of drafting, of development, of a baseball process that goes deeper than writing the biggest checks.
This is Theo Epstein’s program at work. Tonight, tomorrow, maybe Wednesday, the Red Sox will put even more distance between themselves and a century of frustrations with their second title in a new one. It will be the first title for the program, however, and it will absolutely not be the last.
On my fresh Leopard install, UTF-8 didn't quite work in Terminal.
Update
After discussions with Allan who had noticed similar issues, it seems that this issue is due to some bug you may run into when customizing your region formats in the International preference pane; so see this post as a solution if you run into that as well.
If you haven't customized the formats, or you selected a region and later customized that, you probably don't have this issue.
A file named
tästwas displayed by e.g.lsast??stThis was even after adding
export LC_CTYPE=sv_SE.UTF-8as described in desp's guide. You might want to set
en_US.UTF-8if you're American, and so on.Unchecking the "Set LANG environment variable on startup" checkbox in the Terminal settings, under the "Advanced" tab, fixes it though. I've tested this in both bash and zsh.
When the box is checked, the
localecommand returns (among other things)LANG="UTF-8"
LC_CTYPE="C"It seems to overwrite my
LC_CTYPE. With it unchecked, I getLANG=
LC_CTYPE="sv_SE.UTF-8"and
lsnow displaystästas it should.
Congratulations to my pal Merlin Mann and his wife Madeline.
The New York Public Library's skunkworks is currently experimenting with a number of blogs, one of which -- quite naturally, given the existence of the NYPL's map division -- deals with maps: Maps @ NYPL is still at an early...
More on this soon, but an important heads-up: If you’ve got APE installed, you should upgrade to Leopard with a Clean Install or Archive and Install, not an upgrade. People doing upgrades with (apparently outdated versions of) APE installed are getting stuck at a blue screen after the installation. Love the way Apple’s support document puts quotes around “enhancement” when describing what APE is.
(My upgrade advice still stands — APE is the sort of “unholy diddling with system software” that warrants a Clean Install.)
Update: Unsanity’s Slava Karpenko has acknowledged the problem on Unsanity’s weblog.
By request, I did an "Open In TextMate" Finder toolbar icon for Leopard.
I also took the opportunity to write a new script, based on Simon Dorfman's. Clicking the toolbar icon now opens the selected file or files if there is a selection; otherwise it opens the current directory. You can also drag-and-drop files to the icon to open those.
Behind the scenes, the script is all AppleScript, without dropping into the shell. Feels a bit more robust.
A single TextMate window will open, containing all selected or dropped items in a project.
I put my icon inside the bundle, so it should appear with no extra effort. I also toggled a flag in the bundle so you don't see the script appear and disappear in the dock when triggered.
Download OpenInTextMate.zip, extract the file somewhere (I keep it in
/Applications/Scripts), then drag it onto the Finder toolbar. You'll need to wiggle it a bit for the toolbar to catch on.If you like your toolbar all grayscale, feel free to use
(save the linked icon file, not the displayed PNG image) instead, and copy it into the script as described here.
The code:
-- Opens the currently selected Finder files, or else the current Finder window, in TextMate. Also handles dropped files and folders.-- By Henrik Nyh <http://henrik.nyh.se>
-- Based loosely on http://snippets.dzone.com/posts/show/1037-- script was clicked
on run
tell application "Finder"
if selection is {} then
set finderSelection to folder of the front window as string
else
set finderSelection to selection as alias list
end if
end tell
tm(finderSelection)
end run-- script was drag-and-dropped onto
on open(theList)
tm(theList)
end open-- open in TextMate
on tm(listOfAliases)
tell application "TextMate"
open listOfAliases
activate
end tell
end tm
![[Screenshot]](http://henrik.nyh.se/uploads/icon-composer-toolbar.png){kind=icon}
![[Screenshot]](http://henrik.nyh.se/uploads/finder-leopard-tm.png)
