randomwalks/dj

Flavio Galvagni of Lab Zero has pointed out a few of his projects that I think deserve mention here.

[Image: The solar-powered Minimum Mobile Module by Lab Zero].

Let me say right away, though, that I know a lot of people are tired of shipping container architecture – in fact, I think most people are tired of shipping container architecture – yet I have a fairly limitless patience for this sort of thing. Actually, I love shipping container architecture.
But the same questions inevitably arise whenever things like this re-appear in the blogosphere: Are shipping containers comfortable? Is reusing them as a form of readymade architecture even structurally realistic? Would anyone really want to raise a family inside one of these things? And does the appeal of such designs actually cross cultures and income levels and ethnicities and, more important, climates? Sure, these might work in Santa Monica – but would they work in Minneapolis-St. Paul?
To which I would have to say that the answer is: no, they probably aren't that comfortable when it comes to raising two and a half kids – and they probably don't equally appeal to, say, bedouins, Russian oil tycoons, Detroit's inner city poor, suburban parents, or even BLDGBLOG readers.
But I don't think those are the right questions to ask.
I don't think the point of cargo container architecture is for us to pretend that it's a universally appropriate design solution for every situation that could possibly exist in the world today – because it isn't. Then again, nothing is universally appropriate in architecture.
What I think is, actually, the point of reusing shipping containers as architecture is: 1) when you can, you should reuse existing materials for somewhat obvious environmental reasons, and 2) the spatial, logical, and combinatorial systems that cargo containers imply are simply awesome. The possibilities excite me. Container-made buildings are fun to look at, they're fun to render, and they're fun to imagine forming new architectural reefs and Tetris cities, interlocking in a sci-fi future coming soon to a landscape near you.
Whole new outer districts of London made from shipping container towers!

[Image: The Minimum Mobile Module by Lab Zero; view larger].

So arguments about the architectural reuse of shipping containers shouldn't be based on the claim that it's all or nothing; it's not either we replace all existing architecture in the world with cargo containers and then force everyone to live in them or we never construct a single cargo container building anywhere ever again, even for something as simple as a meditation retreat in your own backyard.
Maybe only one cargo container building will ever be built again – or maybe none will – but that doesn't mean we can't still screw around for hours on end with them on our home computers, virtually assembling weird new unfolding structures or houses with legs or helicopter-borne instant cities simply because it's fun and a way to kill time.
In other words, even if these plans serve as nothing but design exercises – studies in volume, combination, and color – then that's fine with me. We can be done with the ongoing arguments and just enjoy looking at cool imagery.
But I digress.
Lab Zero has put together a number of cool projects, including the solar-powered Minimum Mobile Module, pictured above, and the Carapace House, below.

[Image: The Carapace House by Lab Zero; view larger].

The Carapace House – a larger diagram of which can be seen here – is intended for use in "challenging natural environments."
Similar to Lab Zero's own Drop Off Unit, the Carapace House is temporary, mobile, and easy to "drop off" in a variety of locations.

[Image: The Drop Off Unit by Lab Zero; view larger or in more detail].

All of which brings us to the Jellyfish House – not that Jellyfish House – a kind of floating tower perfect for those of us interested in "spatial delocation."
You can drift around the world's oceans in it, reading William Gibson.

[Image: The Jellyfish House by Lab Zero; view bigger].

The Lab Zero website is still apparently under construction, meanwhile, but keep your eye out for more of their work in the future. They were featured in Actar's recent book Self-Sufficient Housing, for instance, and will no doubt be popping up elsewhere soon.
And for more cargo containers on BLDGBLOG see Container Home Kit or even Project Blackbox.

Originally posted by Geoff Manaugh from BLDGBLOG, on November 24, 2007 5:29 PM

Good friends Lize Mogel and Alexis Bhagat have been hard at work on a really great project called An Atlas of Radical Cartography. A collection of maps and essays illustrating the intersections of geography, mapping, politics and activism, it is finally coming out! Beyond being politically engaging, it is an amazing book object, a slip case that contains a book of essays and 10 actual full-size fold-out maps dealing with such issues as extraordinary rendition/torture planes, garbage and waste removal, water pathways, borders and surveillance cameras. Here's a couple shots of the maps: They will be on display in Chicago starting this weekend: An Atlas November 27 2007 – January 19, 2008 Gallery 400, University of Illinois, Chicago OPENING RECEPTION and book launch: Wednesday, November 28, 5-8pm Gallery talk @ 6:30pm An Architektur the Center for Urban Pedagogy (CUP) Ashley Hunt Institute for Applied Autonomy with Site-R Invisible-5 Pedro Lasch Lize Mogel Trevor Paglen & John Emerson Brooke Singer the Speculators of AREA Chicago Jane Tsong Unnayan Organized by Lize Mogel and Alexis Bhagat An Atlas is a traveling exhibition of artists working with “radical cartography”—a practice that uses maps and mapping to promote social change. The participating artists, architects, and collectives take on issues from globalization to garbage and explore the map’s role as a political agent. The exhibition and accompanying publication contribute to a growing cultural movement that cuts across boundaries of art, cartography, geography, and activism. The companion publication, An Atlas of Radical Cartography (Journal of Aesthetics and Protest Press, 2007) will be available for purchase at the gallery, and available online as of December 1. Click here for more information and Chicago-area lecture schedule. And finally there will a New York City book launch at Bluestockings Books on 172 Allen St. on December 6th.

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Just Seeds: Blog, on November 24, 2007 12:25 PM

FoodPairing builds connected graphs of flavor components of major foods in order to suggest food pairings and interchangeable products.

(via del.icio.us)

Originally posted by ry from Modcult, on November 24, 2007 6:05 AM

French designers continue to put the “fab” in prefab: Construisons Demain, a brilliant design from architect Eric Wuilmot, premiered at Batimat in Paris earlier this month. The system showcases low-energy living with three prefabricated wooden modules, resource and energy efficient systems, healthy finish materials, and inviting living spaces.

(more…)

Originally posted by Ali from INHABITAT, ReBlogged by Leah Gauthier on Nov 24, 2007 at 09:34 AM

Originally posted by Ali from Eyebeam reBlog, on November 24, 2007 4:34 AM

Long before Big Bird and Fraggle Rock, Jim Henson was dabbling in avant-garde cinema. Check out a young Henson appearing in his own far-out short, called Time Piece, which owes no small debt to John Cage. "Dislocation in time, time signatures, time as a philosophical concept, and slavery to time are some of the themes touched upon in this nine-minute, experimental film, which was written, directed, and produced by Jim Henson – and starred Jim Henson!” (It starts out a bit slow but gets really wild – and keep your eyes peeled for Frank “Yoda” Oz’s cameo as messenger boy.)

Screened for the first time at the Museum of Modern Art in May of 1965, Time Piece ran for a year and a half at one Manhattan movie theater and was nominated for an Academy Award. (Hat tip Goldenfiddle, who is selling his iconic T-shirts again.)

Originally posted by John Del Signore from Gothamist Weekly Favorites, on November 23, 2007 10:06 AM

JWZ reveals the hidden Dock pinning prefs — instead of centering the Dock, you can pin it to the left or right (on the bottom), or top or bottom (on the side). I’ve been using this ever since 10.0, but it’s one of those hidden prefs many people don’t know about.

 ★ 

Originally posted by John Gruber from Daring Fireball, on November 23, 2007 9:51 AM

“So which is the real Bernie Kerik? Is it the one who pleads not guilty before or is it the one who pleads guilty after he cuts a deal that he’s comfortable with?” - NY1 caller Dalton, from the Upper East Side, to "The Call"

Those were the questions that cost NY1 reporter Gary Anthony Ramsay his job, after calling into his own station under a false name. The station deemed it an exceptionally poor judgment and fired the reporter (though they told the Daily News that Ramsay left to pursue other opportunities). From the New York Times:

Mr. Ramsay said he was at his Upper West Side home watching the program, when he became frustrated with some viewers’ comments, including those who said they believed that supporters of Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton had a role in the investigation.

It turns out the host of The Call, John Schiumo, called Ramsay afterwards to say he recognized his voice! Ramsay says he apologized and admitted that it was a bad idea to call in under a false name, but that they would have been completely acceptable in a different forum. Ultimately, he said, "I am continually apologetic for smudging that journalistic line, but I’m a human being, and I’m subject to the same frailties.”

Ramsay was fired after 15 years at the station. The departure wasn't that abrupt - he was scheduled to leave the station because his contract ran out in the summer. Last year, a co-worker accused him of sexual harassment.

Originally posted by Dave Hogarty from Gothamist Weekly Favorites, on November 23, 2007 9:01 AM

Thoughtful comments from Siva Vaidhyanathan on the Kindle:

As far as the dream of textual connectivity and annotations -- making books more "Webby" -- we don't need new devices to do that. Nor do we need different social processes. But we do need better copyright laws to facilitate such remixes and critical engagement.

So consider this $400 device from Amazon. Once you drop that cash, you still can't get books for the $9 cost of writing, editing, and formating. You still pay close to the $30 physical cost that includes all the transportation, warehousing, taxes, returns, and shoplifting built into the price. You can only use Amazon to get texts, thus locking you into a service that might not be best or cheapest. You can only use Sprint to download texts or get Web information. You can't transfer all you linking and annotating to another machine or network your work. If the DRM fails, you are out of luck. If the device fails, you might not be able to put your library on a new device.

All the highfallutin' talk about a new way of reading leading to a new way of writing ignores some basic hard problems: the companies involved in this effort do not share goals. And they do not respect readers or writers.

I say we route around them and use these here devices -- personal computers -- to forge better reading and writing processes.

Originally posted by ben vershbow from if:book, on November 23, 2007 8:23 AM

ABC News has posted a pretty compelling interview with Mike Huckabee about immigration. In it, Huckabee was asked about charges from rivals that he's soft on immigration because he supported the children of illegal immigrants being eligible for scholarships and backed free prenatal care for illegal immigrants in need of it.

Huckabee's response:

"We penalize law-breakers. We don't penalize their children for something they can't help.

"If a child is gasping for air, asthmatic, and he's on the hospital steps, what do the other candidates suggest we do, let him sit there and gasp until he doesn't have any air left and he dies? If a child comes to our school -- and our law, by the way, in most of our states, mine certainly says you've got to educate a child if he's of child age -- what do you, break your own law and say, `No, you can't come in the schoolhouse door'?

"No, you don't do that. What you do is you elect a president who will fix the problem where it needs to be fixed: At the border. But if your government at the federal government is so incompetent that it fails to secure the border, you don't then grind your heel into the face of a 6-year-old child over it. That's not what this country does. We're a better country than that."

Right, but the question is whether the GOP base, not the country as a whole, is "better" than this. That Huckabee actually has to defend such sentiments tells you pretty much all you need to know about the sway that today's nativist right holds over GOP primary politics.

Originally posted by Greg Sargent from TPM Election Central, on November 23, 2007 7:05 AM

New Yorkers like to joke about the spread of chain drugstores, bank branches, and Starbucks in the city, but residents of Sunnyside, Queens can claim bragging rights in a shining example of the phenomena. Greenpoint Avenue is home to two adjacent Rite Aid drugstores, which sit literally right next to each other.

According to the Daily News, it initially appears to be one giant store, but, in fact, they are two separately owned and operated drugstores separated by a single wall. At least one neighborhood resident was disoriented after walking out of one store and then almost back into the second: "I said to myself, 'Wait. Didn't I just come out of Rite Aid?"

The newer of the two stores used to be an Eckerd pharmacy before the chain was acquired by Rite Aid. Now the two stores co-exist side by side on Greenpoint Ave. There is a third Rite Aid pharmacy three blocks away on 45th St. and 43rd Ave. If one has further trouble finding a Rite Aid, there's always the chain's store locater.

Company officials said that market research supported the decision to have twin stores on the street, but wouldn't comment to the Daily News on the financial performance of any of the three in the area. The president of the neighborhood's chamber of commerce wishes there were fewer drugstores and more businesses that would make Sunnyside a tourist destination, "like the Gap."

Originally posted by Dave Hogarty from Gothamist Weekly Favorites, on November 23, 2007 6:16 AM

Taiwan’s Brilliant “Recycle” Icon — Jacob — aatw. Wait for it… there!

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Marco.org Tumblelog, on November 23, 2007 5:49 AM

Stephen Malkmus and the Million Dollar Bashers "Ballad of a Thin Man" - David Edelstein's review of Todd Haynes' new film I'm Not There in the most recent issue of New York Magazine may be positive, but in complaining that Haynes is more concerned with deconstructing Bob Dylan than getting inside his head, he clues us in to just how little he understood what the movie is actually about, i.e., not the guy who sleeps and eats and DJs on satellite radio. It's about the cultural representation of Dylan, and as such, it's more about us than it is about him. Not to undersell the film's substance, but when you boil down all the things that I'm Not There has to say about Dylan in particular and art in general, it's essentially about the way we turn artists into icons, and the way the mythology that we create around them can take on a life and meaning that is far greater than the person, and sometimes even the work itself.

Haynes splits Dylan into six characters, none of whom are called Bob Dylan. (The name is never once uttered in the film.) Only half of the actors resemble the man, and the one who is most clearly evocative of his actual style and mannerisms is a woman in drag. It's important that it's drag, by the way -- Cate Blanchett's performance as the Dylan of Don't Look Back is meant to be an over-the-top, fabulous caricature of the artist at his most iconic, and it's the representation that is most charged with transgressive sexuality -- both his own, and what Blanchett claims for herself as she occupies his persona. Blanchett's Dylan is my favorite, mainly because she is standing in for the Dylan I appreciate the most: The "pop" Dylan; the cynical, frustrated young artist who fought against being pigeon-holed by the media; the iconoclast who stood up to the smug, self-righteous conservatism of the folk movement at the Newport Folk Festival and the Royal Albert Hall. The events of those two concerts are represented in the film with a great deal of humor, surrealism, and melodrama. It's a folk story, passed down through generations, and that's the point. It isn't about the truth of those events, it's about the cultural resonance of his actions, and the way we tell and internalize the meaning of the narrative -- it's the moment where Dylan ceases to be a folk singer, and becomes a folk hero.

Unsurprisingly, my second favorite Dylan in I'm Not There is the one played by Marcus Carl Franklin. Unlike the fairly representational versions of Dylan portrayed by Blanchett, Ben Whishaw, and Christian Bale -- or the glamorous post-modern/meta representation of Heath Ledger, who plays an actor playing Dylan in a biopic -- Franklin's character is purely metaphorical, and stands in for the young Dylan eager to cast off his past and reinvent himself on his own terms. The scenes with Franklin suggest that the singer's transforming persona is an intrinsic part of his character, and of his art -- from early on, he understood the power of becoming a character, of becoming something else for the benefit of his art, his audience, and himself.

The film does not follow a linear path, but it's important to note that the story begins with Franklin since it establishes the central conflict of the picture, i.e., the complications of reconciling the differences between the artist's embrace of affectation, and the premium placed on authenticity in folk music, and the culture at large -- or at least up until the end of the 70s, since its worth noting that Dylan's life after his conversion to Christianity in 1979 is not acknowledged in any way by the film. (It makes sense -- nothing else after that moment in his life has any particular mythic resonance, and so Dylan the legend effectively died when his life ceased to be a story.) Even though there are six incarnations of Dylan in I'm Not There, there's really just two versions of his myth on display, and they are at odds with one another -- he's either the idealistic truth-teller, or the guy who forces us to look beyond objective truth of biography and dig into the complicated mess of life via fiction, poetry, and reinvention of character. You don't really have to pick one or the other, but I'm pretty sure I only really have use for the latter version.

Oh yeah, and doesn't Stephen Malkmus sound like he's on his very best behavior on this version of "Ballad of a Thin Man"? When I first heard his three cuts on the I'm Not There soundtrack, I was kinda shocked by the reverence in his voice. I mean, I wasn't expecting him to goof off or rewrite the lyrics, but after seeing the film, the straight, somewhat mannered vocal take makes a bit more sense -- he's providing the singing voice of Cate Blanchett, and he has to bend to her performance. Well, that, and he's a Dylan fanboy, and I imagine he was just trying hard not to fuck it up. (Click here to buy it from Amazon.)

Originally posted by Matthew Perpetua from FLUXBLOG: Wry and Wise, But Also Very Sexual, on November 23, 2007 4:05 AM

Clever:

...I thought it would be interesting to find out the account password. Wordpress stores raw MD5 hashes in the user database.... As with any respectable hash function, it is believed to be computationally infeasible to discover the input of MD5 from an output. Instead, someone would have to try out all possible inputs until the correct output is discovered.

[...]

Instead, I asked Google. I found, for example, a genealogy page listing people with the surname "Anthony", and an advert for a house, signing off "Please Call for showing. Thank you, Anthony". And indeed, the MD5 hash of "Anthony" was the database entry for the attacker. I had discovered his password.

Originally posted by schneier from Schneier on Security, on November 23, 2007 2:07 AM

"I didn't cover many technical issues but instead tried to convince some people to recognize that the way you use JavaScript in your team is the most important part of development. ... working as if you won't ever see the code again."

Originally posted by Michal Migurski from tecznotes links, on November 22, 2007 10:05 AM

By Sergei Kovalev

I should begin by saying that I find the current president of Russia and his policies extremely offensive. I believe that Vladimir Putin is the most sinister figure in contemporary Russian history. From the very beginning of his rule he has directed--and almost completed--a broad antidemocratic counterrevolution in Russia. He has annihilated many civil rights in the country, among them such crucial freedoms as freedom of information. He has significantly restricted freedom of association and assembly, as well as the right to stage peaceful marches, protests, and demonstrations.

Originally posted by Sergei Kovalev from The New York Review of Books, on November 22, 2007 7:00 AM

Santa Monica Farmers Market
Originally uploaded by hustler of culture

This morning I was inspired by this entry and this one. A line from the second entry -- "Something so much greater is holding you, I’m sure of it." -- my friend said to me two days ago, almost word for word.

Yesterday I went to the farmers market in New York (this one is in Santa Monica but I like the picture) and it was filled with so many goodies. It was a nice reminder of the beauty of the holidays. I had some nice apple cider and simply walked around.

Ten things I am thankful for:

1. My amazing friends - for everything!
2. My Godson/Nephew - for being so cute and for making me believe that I could fall in love with a little person
3. My apartment - for the solitude
4. My job - for not being a place filled with crazy people
5. My relatives - for coming out of the wood work and being so cool
6. My Netflix account - for bringing me joy every few weeks
7. My blog community - for reading and for all of the great advice/word of wisdom
8. My computer -for surviving its near death experience
9. My health - for improving
10. My LP - for keeping me sane

Originally posted by Angela Tucker from tuckergurl, on November 22, 2007 6:33 AM

You already know a little bit about what I'm doing for Thanksgiving, thanks to my post here yesterday, but I thought I'd ask the Serious Eats staff here in the office what they were doing and what they were thankful for.

ED LEVINE
I thought I'd elaborate a bit on what I wrote yesterday, since I didn't really give my menu in detail. I am cooking for my wife's family, thirteen strong. They're an affable, generously spirited crew who are genuinely appreciative of the effort Vicky and I put forth. We are having cheese and bread; turkey; cornbread, sausage, and apple stuffing; sweet potato purée with maple syrup, butter, dried cherries, and candied ginger; mashed potatoes à la Al Forno; and apple pie, coconut cream pie, pumpkin pie, pecan pie, and a crumb pie to be determined.

I'm thankful for my wonderful wife, Vicky; my most favorite son (and only child), Will, my family and friends who have been so incredibly helpful and supportive during this magical launch year for Serious Eats, and, finally, for all the Serious Eaters who have joined our merry band of passionate, discerning, inclusive food lovers.

Happy Thanksgiving, Serious Eaters.

ALAINA BROWNE
I'll be celebrating Thanksgiving at home with my husband. Because it's just the two of us, we're keeping it simple. Our menu: roasted turkey breast (maybe bacon-covered?), mashed potatoes, gussied up Whole Foods 365 stuffing with cranberries, cranberry sauce, and for sentimental reasons, Green Bean Casserole. If we still have room, there will be pumpkin pie for dessert. The day after I'd like to try to out this simple, crusty bread recipe to make leftover turkey sandwiches.

I'm thankful for: family, friends, and Serious Eaters everywhere.

ROBYN LEE
This year I'm going to catch up on some glorious sleep and eat dinner at home with my mom and my older brother, Hubert. Mom is in charge of the turkey (she always is), while I'll be making Pioneer Woman's mashed potatoes, Dorie Greenspan's Sour Cream Pumpkin Pie with Cook's Illustrated's Foolproof Pie Dough (and it better be foolproof, because God knows I'm no pie maven), gravy, and cranberry sauce. Hubert will do nothing because he's useless. It's OK; he knows it.

I'm most thankful for my friends and family. I mean, that I have them. Phew! How I tricked so many people into being my friend, I have no idea. Just waiting for the day that they decide to abandon me because they find out I'm mentally unstable.

I'm also thankful that, for all the traveling I did, I didn't die in a plane crash. Or a car crash. Or a train derailment.

Something that my friends constantly remind me to be thankful for is that I have a freakin' sweet job with the coolest co-workers ever, a rare thing to find straight out of college. Yes, yes I do.

ADAM KUBAN
I used to alternate between visiting my grandmother and extended family in Milwaukee for Thanksgiving and hosting a stragglers' feast, but for the last three years, my girlfriend and I have eaten Thanksgiving at a restaurant. The first time we went out for Thanksgiving, I felt like I was betraying tradition, but it was something new to try, so I was up for it—just that once. Turns out I really like the notion, and we've gone to a different place each year. This year we're going to Eleven Madison Park, where I'm going to eat:

• Pumpkin velouté with candied quince and Hawaiian prawns
• Heirloom beets marinated with olio verde, aceto balsamico, and lynnhaven "chèvre frais"
• Roast turkey with butternut squash, stuffing and glazed chestnuts
• Sides for the table: potato mousseline, braised red cabbage, cranberry chutney, brussels sprouts with bacon lardons, parsnip ecrassé, and baked sweet potato

It's probably the "fanciest" Thanksgiving menu I've ever had and I had to look up a few of those words. I'm looking forward to it.

I'm thankful for: my family, friends, and girlfriend and the fact that they haven't written me off this past year as I seem to work all the time now. My job, and being able to wake up and actually feel like going to work. My coworkers, who are awesome. All the Serious Eats contributors, who make it easy to put out great reading day after day. And, of course, everyone who reads Serious Eats, be they lurkers or participants in the discussions going on around the site.

Originally posted by Ed Levine from Serious Eats: Main, on November 22, 2007 4:30 AM

Thanks, Russell, originally uploaded by blackbeltjones.

I’ve cut short my time at the BBC to spend more time on Dopplr.

I’m also hopefully going to continue with the teaching beyond the project I’m currently involved with at the RCA, and do some design consultancy work - for which Russell was kind enough to prepare the above.

Perhaps this could be the start a lucrative sideline for him?

Originally posted by Matt from Blackbeltjones/Work, on November 22, 2007 1:13 AM

How to program Google Android.

The only way to judge an SDK is getting in there and writing an application that does something cool, so I’ll take you through the development process for my first Android application.

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Justin Blanton, on November 22, 2007 12:34 AM

[Note: I’m going to be writing some longer posts about the needs of a cloud computer. This first post details the need for reliable supply. Please take this in the spirit it’s offered: a survey of one company and its experience in the market.]

I wrote recently that the operating system doesn’t matter anymore for developers of internet applications. Joyent’s announcement last week that we would be providing free cloud computing infrastructure to Facebook developers is further evidence that this is true. We spent a considerable amount of time optimizing Joyent Accelerators for Facebook, not for OpenSolaris (the OS we use). A Facebook developer can sign up for a free Joyent Accelerator here, get their application up and running within a few minutes, and be on their way. We did this a couple times with a couple customers last week at the Dallas Facebook Developer Garage. One of them had been kicked off their hosting provider because they were actually using some of the “free” bandwidth that over-selling hosting providers market. They were up and running on Joyent Accelerators within minutes of getting their log-in. The operating system didn’t matter in the process.

Joyent the Meta-manufacturing Company: We Need Stuff On-demand

If the operating system doesn’t matter to developers, the server under the operating system shouldn’t matter either. In fact, that is true to the extent that there are many makers of server hardware and they are mostly interchangeable. But in another way, the servers does matter to developers. Can the server hardware manufacturer your development stack runs on scale at the velocity of your application? While most Joyent customers don’t worry about whether we have enough power and cooling, they will need to worry, at a point, whether we have enough CPU, RAM, and storage. And, since Joyent doesn’t make any of those consumables, we have to turn to businesses that do. Joyent is, in this regard, a meta-manufacturing company. We manufacture a compute cloud upon which developers can run web applications and scale them. Our Facebook offering, and the scale issues that can face developers on Facebook, meant that we had to have parts suppliers for our cloud computer that could also scale.

A Brief Excursus: What Happened with Joyent and Sun?

When I got off the stage last week at the Dallas Facebook Developers Garage having made the announcement about Facebook and Joyent and Dell, one of the consistent questions was: “What happened to your relationship with Sun?” We continue to use Sun technology for critical parts of our infrastructure. The most obvious is our choice of Solaris Zones as virtualization building block of Joyent Accelerators. We continue to believe this is a better choice than embracing Xen (though others don’t always agree, ironically). This doesn’t mean we’ll never use Xen. We still don’t support .NET, a technology that is officially supported for Facebook developers. Xen would help with that. But so would VMWare.

One problem with Sun continues to be the sales model. In order to ensure dependable supply, we had to sign-up to buy large numbers of servers whether we actually used them or not. Sun put the risk onto the customer. We came to the conclusion that Joyent can’t buy from Sun if Joyent can’t buy direct from Sun. Faced with the tsunami that the Facebook opportunity represented, we couldn’t/didn’t know how big a pre-buy to make. It was too big a risk.

This on top of the fact that we wanted to buy the new Sunfire X4150 (dual socket, quad-core) but nobody in the channel (that hated word, “channel”) could tell us when we could get them. This for a model that had been announced weeks back. Why not just continue with the Sunfire X4100s we’ve been using. Well, for one, the X4150s allow us to cram tons of storage into the server, thus side-stepping many of the iSCSI issues (target) we have had with OpenSolaris. It’s one reason Joyent has been buying NetApps. And, again, the Facebook opportunity meant we would be building out significant infrastructure. To put it into the context of a systems manufacturer: our servers are Joyent’s CPU. We didn’t feel like installing the 586, when the 686 was freely available on the market.

Jonathan Schwartz has said these problems would be fixed, but they haven’t. And we don’t see anything to indicate that they will. We’ve talked with all sorts of Sun sales people. They put us into a special group for internet companies. We have made personal appeals to senior executives at Sun (that generally are answered…thanks for that). We’ve passed out bottles of 18-year old scotch. But the fact remains: every time Joyent engages Sun sales, they can’t really sell me something. The channel gets in the way. This is unfortunate, and ironic, for a company that did $1 billion in direct sales in a year (within three years of being founded).

So we called Dell

We had test systems FedEx’d to us and confirmation that Joyent would be able to run our stack on their stack within 36 hours. Once we had given the green light, the systems were in our data centers in two days. And OpenSolaris is supported on these systems according to a recent news item. We have a direct sales representative at Dell who is amazing. We don’t have to work the Dell organizational chart because our sales representative just gets things done. There’s not much to say about the Dell relationship because it is drama-free. Joyent’s relationship with Sun wasn’t. A cloud computing company needs reliable, drama-free supply. It’s that simple.

Originally posted by David Young from Joyeur, on November 21, 2007 5:26 PM

There were problems back then. But there was accountability. There was strong leadership. They acted in a professional manner. They were good people. Tradition mattered back then as did treating people with respect and dignity.

 bookmark this on del.icio.us - posted by yatta to knicks - more about this bookmark...

Originally posted by yatta from del.icio.us/yatta, on November 21, 2007 5:01 PM

Design challenge: design a business card-sized year-long calendar that doesn't feature absurdly small type. Some intriguing solutions.

(link)

Originally posted by (author unknown) from kottke.org, on November 21, 2007 12:36 PM

Now why would Michael Bloomberg be doing this:

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg has been receiving foreign policy briefing sessions on a wide variety of topics, providing the strongest indication yet that he is considering a run for the White House, the Huffington Post has learned.

The sessions, which were confirmed by multiple sources, have been conducted with Nancy Soderberg, a former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations and a Clinton Administration foreign policy adviser. One source described her as "Bloomberg's Condi."

A range of topics have been discussed, from non-proliferation to the defense budget, with a specific focus on the war in Iraq.

That really does suggest that he's seriously contemplating a run. One other thing we can conclude from this, meanwhile, is that Bloomberg apparently doesn't share Rudy's view that having been Mayor of New York is adequate preparation for the manifold foreign policy challenges a President faces. He apparently thinks you should learn something about the topic first.

Originally posted by Greg Sargent from TPM Election Central, on November 21, 2007 12:36 PM

Coincidences in linguistics.

(link)

Originally posted by (author unknown) from kottke.org, on November 21, 2007 11:17 AM

The BBC is planning to produce Shakespeare's entire canon for TV...all 37 plays.

(via crazymonk)

(link)

Originally posted by (author unknown) from kottke.org, on November 21, 2007 10:49 AM

Can’t stop linking to Greg Knauss.

 ★ 

Originally posted by John Gruber from Daring Fireball, on November 21, 2007 10:26 AM

100_3438.JPG, originally uploaded by weevil.

Oof. I got back into Austin at midnight and I am just sort of getting re-acclimated around the house before I pass out in a big pile. I just wanted to thank everybody in San Francisco for making my time and my work there so great. Everybody in the cast and crew especially Marika and Steven who managed to juggle work and keeping me entertained during my downtime. My hosts; Jason Schultz from the Electronic Frontier Foundation and George Oates from Flickr who graciously let me stay in their home and shared their wine and conversation. My lovely new Friend Tamera F for showing me the best brunch I have ever had and generally being wonderful. Emily for driving all the way from San Jose to hang out.

I'm going to wait patiently to see what becomes of the movie now. Obviously I'll post news here.

Ok, sleepytime.

Originally posted by weevil@wileywiggins.com (Wiley Wiggins) from News of the dead, on November 21, 2007 10:15 AM

These days there are more online videos demonstrating how to carve a turkey than you can shake a stick at. I got to know the San Francisco Chronicle's Olivia Wu a bit when I attended Taste3 earlier this year, so I'm favorably biased toward her demonstration (above) of how to properly check the temperature of your turkey, and two different carving techniques. Wu's technique is similar to what today's New York Times calls the butcher's method.

Originally posted by Alaina Browne from Serious Eats: Posts and Comments by Alaina Browne, on November 21, 2007 9:00 AM

My friend (a fellow black girl) sent along this email today:

"NBC NIGHTLY NEWS WITH BRIAN WILLIAMS" SPECIAL FIVE-PART SERIES " AFRICAN-AMERICAN WOMEN: WHERE THEY STAND" TO AIR BEGINNING ON MONDAY, NOVEMBER 26 New York, N.Y.

"NBC News With Brian Williams" will take a look at the issues facing
African-American women across our nation in a new series
"African-American Women: Where They Stand." The series will cover a
wide-range of issues from their role in the '08 Presidential race, to
the increased health-risks that they need to be concerned about.

I am so fascinated to see this though having Brian Williams tell me where I stand is a bit ... ironic.

You can read about the various segments at the bottom of this entry.

Monday's installment will discuss African-American women's progress in
the education field. Nearly two-thirds of African-American
undergraduates are women. At black colleges, the ratio of women to men
is 7 to 1. And that is leading to a disparity in the number of
African-American women who go on to own their own businesses. Rehema
Ellis will talk to educators, students and businesswomen about why
this disparity exists.

Tuesday, Ellis will look at the relationships of African-American
women. Many agree the gender disparity in education and business among
African-Americans is having an effect on relationships that African
American women have. Some even say the implications could redefine
"Black America's family and social structure." In the past fifty
years, the percentage of African-American women between 25-54 who have
never been married has doubled from 20% to 40%. (Compared to just 16%
of white women who have never been married today). Ellis sits down
with the members of a Chicago book club and talk about this difference
and how it impacts them.

Dr. Nancy Snyderman will discuss the increases risks for breast cancer
for African-American women on Wednesday. Mortality rates for
African-American women are higher than any other racial or ethnic
group for nearly every major cause of death, including breast cancer.
Black women with breast cancer are nearly 30% more likely to die from
it than white women. Premenopausal black women are more than twice as
likely to get a more aggressive form of the disease. And, not only
are African-American women more likely to die from breast cancer, but
they're less likely to get life-saving treatments. Dr. Snyderman will
profile one of the only oncologists in the world who specializes in
the treatment of African-American women with breast cancer.

On Thursday, Ron Allen will take viewers to South Carolina -- the
first southern primary state -- and ask the question: Will race trump
gender or gender trump race? In South Carolina, black women made up
nearly 30 percent of all democratic primary voters in 2004. This year,
polls show a significant number are undecided, torn between choosing
the first African-American or first female Presidential candidate.
Allen talks with the undecided, as well the state directors for the
Clinton and Obama campaigns, who happen to be African-American women.

To close the series on Friday, Dr. Snyderman will raise the
frightening statistic that African-American women are 85% more likely
to get diabetes, a major complication for heart disease. And, like
breast cancer, more black women die from heart disease than white
women. Dr. Snyderman will profile a leading expert and a unique
church-based outreach program in South Carolina that seeks to spread
the word about heart disease risks to black women congregants.

Mara Schiavocampo, Digital Correspondent for "Nightly News," will
address two hot topics in the African - American community:
interracial dating and the impact of hip hop music on black women.
Interracial dating is a growing trend in the African - American
community. An Essence.com poll found that 81% of participants approved
of black women dating non-black men. According to a U.S. Census
Bureau report in 2000, 95,000 black women were married to white men.
In 2005, that number increased to 134,000. Schiavocampo will talk to
experts about the trend and discuss how this defines the "Black
family" of the future.

Schiavocampo will convene a panel of leading black men and women from
the hip-hop industry for an engaging discussion on whether hip hop
lyrics and videos positively or negatively affect black women. The
roundtable also will address how these portrayals are affecting
relationships between black women and black men.

Consumers can go online to join the discussion and share their
thoughts on message boards. They can also read and respond to blog
entries at _www.nightly.msnbc.com_ ( http://www.nightly.msnbc.com/).

Alexandra Wallace is the executive producer of "NBC Nightly News with
Brian Williams." Bob Epstein is the senior broadcast producer, and
Rich Latour is the senior producer for this series.

NBC News' home on the Internet is http://www.msnbc.com. For more
news and information about "Nightly News," please go to
http://www.nightly.msnbc.com .

Originally posted by Angela Tucker from tuckergurl, on November 21, 2007 8:54 AM

Martha Stewart's six troubleshooting tips for perfect gravy.

Originally posted by Alaina Browne from Serious Eats: Posts and Comments by Alaina Browne, on November 21, 2007 8:45 AM

 

We do a lot of criticism here on Streetsblog, so in the spirit of the season we thought we'd reflect on what we in the livable streets universe have to be thankful for.

We'll get the most obvious one out of the way: a Department of Transportation that looks at the city's streets and sees more than just cars. Then there are the many specific improvements we've seen under the "new" DOT, from sidewalk directional decals to the Ninth Ave cycle track to the hiring of Jan Gehl. And of course there's a lot going on that doesn't involve city government.

What's on your list?

Photo: Louanne/Flickr

Share this

Originally posted by Brad Aaron from Streetsblog, on November 21, 2007 7:24 AM

When we started The New York Review in February 1963 we asked some of the writers we admired most to send us book reviews within three weeks, for no payment, in order, as we said, "to suggest the qualities that a literary journal should have." Norman, whom we all had known in New York, was among the first we turned to, and he soon delivered ...

Originally posted by Robert B. Silvers from The New York Review of Books, on November 21, 2007 7:00 AM

The just-released Michelin restaurant guide for Tokyo awards more stars to that city's restaurants than New York and Paris put together. And 8 get a 3-star rating, only 2 fewer than in Paris.

Tokyo has more restaurants - at least 160,000 that could be classified as proper "restaurants" - than almost any other urban centre. Paris, by comparison, has little more than 20,000 and New York about 23,000.

There's a lot of handwringing about Tokyo restaurants getting so many stars, but to look at it another way, Paris has 8 times fewer restaurants and has more 3 stars than Tokyo. Not bad.

(via marginal revolution)

(link)

Originally posted by (author unknown) from kottke.org, on November 21, 2007 6:53 AM

The Zagat History of My Last Relationship by Noah Baumbach.

At this Wall Street old boys' club, don't be surprised if you run into one of her "ex-boyfriends" who works in "finance." Be prepared for his "power play," when he sends over a pitcher of "the freshest-tasting sangria this side of Barcelona," prompting her to visit his table for "ten minutes" and to come back "laughing" and suddenly critical of your "cravat." The room is "snug," to say the least, and it's not the best place to say, full voice, "What the fuck were you thinking dating him?" But don't overlook the "best paella in town" and a din "so loud" you won't notice that neither of you is saying anything.

(link)

Originally posted by (author unknown) from kottke.org, on November 21, 2007 6:29 AM

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Fashionista, on November 21, 2007 6:00 AM

Here we have a guy taking his crusade against Litespeed to the .org forums. (Litespeed is the server software the official WP sites use instead of Apache; it’s recommended on their requirements page and Codex.) LiteSpeed is not only a commercial product, but it’s closed source and most likely includes code from LightTPD and / or [...]

Originally posted by that girl again from wordpress™ wank, on November 21, 2007 5:20 AM

SNL's Will Forte and Kristen Wiig demonstrate an easy, fun way that fans can take action to support all the WGA writers on strike.

NOTE: If you send pencils through the mail, please send UN-sharpened pencils. Thank you! - your currently unmaimed postal worker

Originally posted by United Hollywood from United Hollywood, on November 20, 2007 9:34 PM

Every time the doors opened tonight on the tram ride home, an amazingly crisp and cold autumn air breathed into the cabin – and it smelled like snow, though no snow was in sight, and so I found myself thinking the two following things:

1) Weather control is the future of urban design.

2) If a city wants to attract new residents it should try scenting the snow.

[Image: New York City in the snow; at this exact moment, the photographer is unknown to BLDGBLOG – if this is your image, please let me know and I will credit you].

A snowstorm rolls in one grey December morning, forming huge drifts... and they smell like spearmint.
They have been chemically scented.
Disused anti-aircraft guns have been shooting flavor crystals into the air, perfectly timed with the crystallization of snowflakes. It's the benign militarization of the climate.
Two towns over the snow smells like wintergreen. And outside Cleveland it smells like beer. It's been snowing beer. Grown men wearing NFL hats rush out of the house, giggling nervously. Is this beer? they shout, catching each other's snowballs, blushing.
You go skiiing in Mont Tremblant – and what do you know? The snow smells like vanilla, chocolate, almond croissants. Pecan-banana pancakes. Earl Grey.
Every year your dad drives you and your family out to that one town in Minnesota where the snow always smells like cinnamon buns and the hotel rooms are so warm.
You stick your head out the window once he's turned the lights out and you just breathe.

Originally posted by Geoff Manaugh from BLDGBLOG, on November 20, 2007 7:02 PM

Originally posted by joy garnett from NEWSgrist - where spin is art, on November 20, 2007 3:08 PM

Meredith Stern The Plights and Flights of Housing $40 Another print addressing housing issues. A woman sweeps her steps trying to rid her home of sexism, racism, homophobia, and poverty which constantly seek to destabilize and infest her home. Above are the birds of peace which come to offer housing for rent and for sale which is affordable, safe and decent, and available now. 3 color reduction linoleum cut print 24" x 40" signed/numbered edition of 25

Originally posted by Meredith Stern from Just Seeds, on November 20, 2007 1:59 PM

We talk a lot about community here on movabletype.org, so it's only appropriate that we hear back from all of you, especially after the recent release of the Movable Type Community Solution. There's been a terrific response, so let's cover some highlights:

• Our new Community Solution-powered Movable Type Forums are starting to show off what an MT-powered forum can do. The forums themselves are still in beta as we test out exactly how they'll work, but they're already worth a look.
• Jesse Gardner's been building out an MTCS-powered site, and he's offered some enticing first impressions of the new offering.
• Tim Appnel weighs in with his own thoughts, picking up on a key point: "The Community Solution does indeed provided the ability to host forums using the MT engine, but it does a lot more too."

And finally, Learning Movable Type has been absolutely rocking lately. Check out just some of the recent tutorials:

• Using Favicons and Gravatar in MT4
• Making Flickr's Blog This work with MT4
• Installing Movable Type under IIS on Windows

Well, we could go on listing these forever, you might as well just subscribe to the site. And if you've got some expertise of your own to share, the site's accepting new contributors so you can offer up your own lessons to the rest of the community as well.

Originally posted by Anil Dash from MovableType.org - Home for the MT Community, on November 20, 2007 1:34 PM

What do you do with all those leftover Jack-o'-Lanterns? Make a make of the United States made out of pumpkin rind!

Originally posted by Robyn Lee from Serious Eats: Main, on November 20, 2007 1:00 PM

I should have waited another day before I posted my Newsworthy Link Dump last week. The following day, Six Apart announced the release of their Community Solution for MT.

As most Six Apart announcements, it got picked up by a number of tech news sources like TechCrunch and CNet.

I thought it kind of odd how these articles pidgeon-holed the Community Solution as forums. The Community Solution does indeed provided the ability to host forums using the MT engine, but it does a lot more too.

The screenscast on the Community Solution product page does a good job of explaining all that the community pack can do in a short period of time. CMSWire did a more through review here. Also, Jesse Gardner of PlasticMind posted his first impression of the Community Solutions.

Prior to the release of the Community Solution, MT Product Manger, Byrne Reese posted a summary to one of the semi-public MT venues the community frequents. (I recall where I got this from now.) It’s the best textual summary I’ve seen encountered and thought I would re-post it here.

The MT4 Community Solution is an add on to the base MT4 personal/commercial editions you can get today. Here is an excerpt from some documentation currently being developed:

Reader Features

• User Profiles - allow your users to publish a simple profile highlighting all of their various contributions to your site
• Avatars or Userpics - allow your users to upload an image of themselves to identify them on the comments and posts they leave behind
• Favoriting or User Voting - allow your users to vote for their favorite content
• Reader Contributed Content - allow for your users to submit, and optionally publish, content of their own
• Preconfigured Solutions for a “Community Blog” and “Forums” - easily deploy a blog with all the community features you want, or a forum in just a few clicks.
• Comment Feeds - publish comments feeds for your site and for each topic, blog post and/or profile.

Administration Features

• Dashboard Widgets - easily monitor activity across your entire network of blogs and forums using dashboard widgets
• Globally Shared Templates - make changes across all of the blogs in your entire system by editing templates that are shared and included across all of your blogs
• Customizable Login and Registration Forms - completely customize every aspect of your sites user interface by wrapping your brand around every screen, including all the registration, login, password recovery screens and more.
• Customizable Email Templates - completely customize the messaging found in the emails sent by the system
• Customizable Profile Meta Data - determine the profile information you want to collect from your users using a simple user interface
• Custom Fields - build out your own data model by customizing all of the fields associated with pages, entries, comments, folders and categories.

Why Use the Community Solution?

First and foremost, the Movable Type Community Solution allows companies to easily:

• create a place where communities can take root.
• foster a communities’ growth.
• monitor and manage the members of a community.
• promote a healthy and vibrant environment where communities can thrive.

But more than that, the Movable Type Community Solution allows companies to:

• easily extend your brand across all aspects of your presence online - use a simple framework for publishing web sites, blogs, forums, and more.
• manage all of your content in one place - don’t rely on different and disconnected software packages to manage your content online, managing all of your content from one place
• get the benefits of single sign-on - by using the same system to manage all of your content your publishers and readers instantly get the benefits of single sign-on, by not having to remember one login for commenting on your blog, logging into the administration interface, or creating a discussion in your forums.
• create best of breed forums - instantly deploy forums that take the best that blogs and forums have to offer.
• increase reader engagement - deploy features to your blog and web site that make it easier for your readers to engage with your content and your company.
• create more advertising inventory - edit and customize every screen and email sent by the application to create more advertising inventory for your company.

It is important to note that the features found within MT4CS will not be open source in the near future. Keep in mind that it has always our plan to have features found in our premium software packages to eventually make their way into the open source product.

Originally posted by Timothy Appnel from Code / Appnel Solutions, on November 20, 2007 12:06 PM

The blogosphere is all het up with talk of Kindle, Amazon’s new e-reader, and most of what I’m reading, in the design and tech blogs, is not positive.

What I find most interesting is all the hype around Kindle, as if e-readers are new. Like, does it really warrant the cover on Newsweek? (And, hey, look familiar?)

I’ve been working near “e-books” for nearly 15 years. In 1994, when I joined the Voyager Company, they had “Expanded Books,” a line of electronic books on floppy disks. They were remarkably well suited to reading on the initial Mac laptops, particularly the PowerBook 100. We had stories of people curling up to their laptops in bed. The Expanded Books also included much of what makes “e”-reading worthwhile — searchable text, bookmarks, annotations, etc.

In the early days of this blog, I wrote a lot about the form of the book. On September 14, 1999, I wrote a long-ish passage on what makes a book a book (before I had permalinks). An excerpt:

Just what makes a book a book? It’s not its form–magazines and other periodicals often match a book’s physical properties, but would never be labelled “book.” And electronic books, which have no physical form beyond the device through which they’re viewed, still qualify as books.

Is it the content? To some extent. Unlike a magazine, a book’s content has an aura of permanence and timelessness, and delves into more involved thoughts.

Still, though, the form is important, and electronic books highlight this. I could take the exact same content, and present it either in a form like a Voyager Expanded Book, or in a single long scrolling Web page. The latter would not be called a book. The notion of page-turning is essential to the category of book, again, even if that page-turning is only being done metaphorically on a computer screen.

So, a book, at it’s core, is an object containing content of permanence presented in a page-turning medium.

And there’s this passage from John Updike’s review of the book The Book on the Bookshelf:

Our notion of a book is of a physical object, precious even if no longer hand-copied on sheepskin by carrel-bound monks, which we can hold, enter at random, shelve for future references and enjoy as a palpable piece of our environment, a material souvenir of the immaterial experience it gave us. That books endure suggests that we endure…

Materiality is central to our relationship with books. And I think this gives a clue as to why Kindle (nor any e-book reader) will never resonate the way iPod has. We’ve been able to move from analog to digital to and from atoms to bits with music because music is ephemeral, and because we don’t lust over the plastic discs (we might lust over their covers/jackets, but that’s a different manner). Whereas people *lust* over their books, smell, hug, annotate, manipulate, and that’s key to the “book experience.”

What I find my dispiriting about the discussion around Kindle is the focus on books. The Newsweek articles spends the bulk of it’s time talking about what it means to read books on a screen, though it mentions

“The Kindle is not just for books. Via the Amazon store, you can subscribe to newspapers (the Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, Le Monde) and magazines (The Atlantic). When issues go to press, the virtual publications are automatically beamed into your Kindle. (It’s much closer to a virtual newsboy tossing the publication on your doorstep than accessing the contents a piece at a time on the Web.) You can also subscribe to selected blogs, which cost either 99 cents or $1.99 a month per blog.”

I find the promise of that far more intriguing. For many, if most people, books require some degree of permanence. Newspapers, magazines, and blogs do not. If you think of the world of documents, books comprise a very tiny portion of that, but such readers could really change our relationship with those documents.

I’m also excited about the opportunities that such readers have for hypertext (no e-book reader matches the hypertext capabilities of the original Voyager Expanded Books), and comics (easily portable infinite canvas!).

Originally posted by peterme from peterme.com, on November 20, 2007 11:43 AM

You may have heard on the grapevine that we were due to release a brand new feature on Flickr. We’re calling it “Places”, and I’m here to tell you what it’s all about.

Often on FlickrBlog, you’ll see posts about photos that catch our eye. You may have noticed that it’s never a developer that posts things like that, because we all have to spend a lot of our time elbow deep in code and just don’t get enough time to take in everything Flickr has to offer.

We needed a cunning plan - one where we get to work on a project and get to see wonderful photos taken all over the globe. So, with our mantra of Flickr being “the eyes of the world” and the dedication of our geotagging members, the Places project was born.

The plan, however, worked too well…

 

As we began to use the first prototype, we all spent an awful lot of time gazing at the amazing photos that kept appearing on our screens. Instant messages would go flying back and forwards amongst the team, saying things like “oooh, look at Shanghai“, “what about Reykjavík then?” and “check out the Calatrava in Valencia!!”

We knew we were on to something good because we couldn’t help ourselves from pausing to enjoy using this new way to see photos on Flickr. We found images we would never have come across any other way, from Flickr members literally all over the world busily capturing what they see.

In many ways the Places project is a big thank you to all the wonderful photographers who have taken the time to put their photos on the map. With nearly 50 million geotagged photos - around 35 million of which are public - it was about build something to better show them off.

As Flickr continues to grow, we’re realizing how much time it takes to figure out better ways to display so much information. We’re still learning! We’re also really excited to show you the results of our play so far. We hope you enjoy exploring as much as we have. There’s so much to see.

Oh, but wait! There’s more!

 

The cherry on top of this Places release is a new view on the hot stuff happening on Flickr. We’ve built an experimental new map view built upon the work of highly trained teams of globe trotting squirrels - sort of like the Magic Donkey* but more rodent-y - whose sole job on the team is to ferret out breaking news (or a nerdy conference, or a wedding, or some other thing that lots of people are photographing) and let us know so we can display it on the new map view. Quite how their squirrelly minds work is a mystery to us all.

Before you go leaping off, there’s just one more thing. Those millions of geotagged photos? Turns out that showing them ‘page by page’ on the map was a silly way to do it, so we’ve taken some time to redesign the browsing interface for the map too. Now you can actually see some of the photos themselves at the same time you’re looking at the map, thanks to our new cleverly titled ‘Photo Ribbon’. Crazy, I know.

We’re dying to hear what you think, or if you find any bugs around the place, so feel free to head for this official forum thread for the new Places project and drop us a line.

* But, what’s the Magic Donkey?

Originally posted by Reverend Dan Catt from Flickr Blog, on November 20, 2007 11:01 AM

Ping-pong pipe — szymon

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Marco.org Tumblelog, on November 20, 2007 10:59 AM

A few notes after upgrading to MacOS X 10.5:

• I installed 10.5 via a standard upgrade, and pretty much everything just worked -- all my apps were fine, and one of the only things I had to re-install was a custom certificate in my Java keychain (certainly not a mainstream thing that most others would experience).
• Like most others, I abhor the new way that the Dock shows folders. I'm not sure which of the handful of changes is worse, though; between the idiotic popup fans and the way that a folder is displayed as a stack of the icons of its contents, the whole implementation is broken.
• While the new Terminal app is way better than its Tiger predecessor, it still doesn't know how to handle fonts. For example, my favorite monospaced programming font, DejaVu Sans Mono, looks nigh unusable in Terminal. And without the ability to set keyboard shortcuts which launch connections to remote servers, iTerm still beats Terminal's pants off.
• The other major thing I had to reinstall was my Cisco VPN client -- but the version I was running under 10.4 still works just fine (as does the fab Shimo app which makes the VPN client usable).
• I'm not wild about the way that Finder windows now look just like iTunes, and it makes me realize how little I care for the new iTunes interface (and thus, the new Finder interface).
• Spaces is also pretty broken (like the inability to wrap around to the beginning of a row or column), so I can't see it getting much use on my computer. That being said, if they fix it, it'll probably be an amazing tool for someone like me who has a few distinct workspaces open at any point in time (e.g., my programming apps, my clinical apps, and my general communications apps).
• Screen Sharing is plainly awesome -- it finally gives users the same capabilities that Microsoft's Remote Desktop has given to Windows users for years. (And one unexpected surprise I discovered: bringing up the Finder's "Connect to Server" window and typing in a "vnc://hostname/" URL does the right thing, launching Screen Sharing and starting up a remote session.) The client app does nice dynamic resizing of the remote desktop, and seems to deal nicely with the typical lagginess of VNC sessions... whatever Apple did, me likey likey.
• The new version of Mail.app doesn't like MsgFiler, my favorite app for quickly filing messages, and it was disabled the first time Mail.app launched. Fortunately, Adam already has instructions online for getting it back working, and the instructions work perfectly (as does MsgFiler).
• I haven't used it enough to be sure, but the wireless subsystem seems to pick up networks that are in your "Preferred Networks" list much faster than Tiger did; there were times with Tiger when I'd wait 30-60 seconds for my MacBook Pro to recognize that I was in the presence of one of my known networks, but I feel like I haven't had to wait more than 10 seconds or so with Leopard.
• While I'm on networking, the new interface for controlling network configurations is just a billion times better than Tiger's. I can't put my finger on the exact reasons why, but after using it a few times, it feels like Apple finally got it right.
• Finally, while not Apple's issue, I'm out on a limb on Leopard since my favorite backup app, SuperDuper, isn't yet compatible with the new OS version. On my Mac Pros, this isn't a huge issue since one of them is centrally backed up and the other has a big drive dedicated to Time Machine; on my MacBook Pro, I'm anxiously awaiting the new version of SuperDuper.

That's all I have for now; this morning, I installed Leopard on the third of the three Macs I use in my regular, day-to-day work, so I'm now immersed enough that I should have a few more observations over the coming days to weeks.

(with comments)

Originally posted by Jason from Q Daily News, on November 20, 2007 9:41 AM

By: Dimitris Meretakis, Product Manager

Be it products, housing, jobs or vehicles, we want to make it easy for you to upload and manage your content in Base. A number of useful features are underway, starting with today's release of a new dashboard for bulk uploads. The new dashboard provides a better overview of the status of your bulk uploads and your items.

New dashboard:


Old dashboard:


We'll keep you posted as new features develop. And as always, we look forward to your feedback and welcome your suggestions. Many of our best ideas come from you!

Originally posted by Google Base Blog from Official Google Base Blog, on November 20, 2007 9:08 AM

Erik Ruin Take Care $6 Good for all occasions, this image is printed in dark blue on a traditional fold-out greeting card. greeting card (1 color silkscreen print) 4.5"x5.5" textured cream cardstock unsigned/unnumbered

Originally posted by Erik Ruin from Just Seeds, on November 20, 2007 8:22 AM

William Gibson doesn't have to write about the future anymore because he believes the present is so much more unlikely.

If one had gone to talk to a publisher in 1977 with a scenario for a science-fiction novel that was in effect the scenario for the year 2007, nobody would buy anything like it. It's too complex, with too many huge sci-fi tropes: global warming; the lethal, sexually transmitted immune-system disease; the United States, attacked by crazy terrorists, invading the wrong country. Any one of these would have been more than adequate for a science-fiction novel. But if you suggested doing them all and presenting that as an imaginary future, they'd not only show you the door, they'd probably call security.

(link)

Originally posted by (author unknown) from kottke.org, on November 20, 2007 6:33 AM

Posted by Nitin Mangtani, Lead Product Manager, Enterprise Search and Rajat Mukherjee, Group Product Manager, Search

In our Mountain View, California lobby, there's an image of a globe radiating colo(u)red beams of light, representing searches in different languages in countries all over the world. It's quite mesmerizing to watch. (You should check it out if you visit.)


Today, we're pleased to tell you that the Google Custom Search platform is available in 40 languages, in close to 80 countries worldwide. And now you can search your Custom Search engine (CSE) in the language of your choice. We hope to see more people creating useful CSEs -- we want to see more colo(u)red beams on the globe!

The Custom Search platform brings the relevance, reliability, speed and power of Google search to webmasters and developers worldwide. Webmasters can use CSE to create tailored search experiences on community web sites; businesses can add hosted site search to their web sites; users can add search to their blogs and web pages; and developers can build search right into their applications with the Custom Search APIs. There's no software to install or hardware to maintain. CSEs can be built in minutes and are easy to customize and manage. You can also control the appearance of the search results to match the look and feel of your web site. Now, you can administer your favo(u)rite CSE in the language of your choice.

There's a free, ads-supported version, and there's also the Custom Search Business Edition (CSBE), in which further customization of search results is possible using an XML API, and ads are optional. CSBE also offers options for email and phone support.

Our international launch of the Custom Search platform now brings CSBE to your country. Millions of businesses all over the world have a web presence but offer users no ability to search their site. Users are left on their own to navigate content once they land on a site. Now, organizations and businesses everywhere can enable Google-hosted site search to help users find what they need.

The UK Parliament uses CSBE on its website to make nine million documents easily accessible to the public. Monarch Airlines is using CSBE to help manage the growing number of customer enquiries about hand baggage regulations and the increased focus on airline security. Since adding CSBE they have seen a 30% reduction in inbound email as more customers now find what they need online. A leading Serbian media system B92, which includes both a TV and radio station and a leading web portal, B92.net, offers Custom Search on various sections of its site, such as sport, business, culture and technology. B92.net also uses several unique features, including linked CSEs, search refinements, and the capability to exclude certain sections of their sites from search results. Belfabriek, a provider of 0800 and 0900 service numbers in The Netherlands, wanted to offer customers the speed and quality of searching with Google. Since using CSBE, the number of callers has decreased substantially as people find the information they need and register their numbers directly through their website. Indian cricket site Cricbuzz uses a CSE to provide cricket fans relevant cricket content for any search related to cricket, using search refinements for drilling down into scores, player profiles, records, blogs and news.

We'd like to hear from you about your CSE too. Please keep that feedback coming.

Originally posted by Karen from Official Google Blog, on November 20, 2007 3:25 AM

Brian Marick's recent series on Actor-Network Theory (parts I, II, III, and IV) reminded me to dig up Science In Action for a fresh books post. I read this book a little over a year ago, after becoming interested in the philosophy of science through Karl Popper, and further diving has since led me to Paul Feyerabend, Thomas Kuhn, and Tracy Kidder's Soul Of A New Machine.

There are two big ideas I took away from this 20-year-old Bruno Latour book about the workings of science and technology. One is a figure-ground reversal akin to the NRA's famous slogan, "guns don't kill people, people kill people". The second is a description of the social conditions that make science possible. Latour frames his argument by introducing the concept of technoscience, his term for the kind of scientific inquiry that needs people, work, equipment, and funding - national laboratories, cancer research, particle physics, the sort of projects that Russell Davies recently described as thirteen smart guy problems in a post about Malcolm Gladwell.

The figure-ground reversal substitutes the common diffusion model with Latour's translation model. The former explains progress in terms of "ideas moving through society", while the latter places the people who act upon ideas in the foreground. People with desires and beliefs occupy the active role in Latour's world, moving ideas forward if they feel their own plans and agendas to be supported. Latour asserts that the diffusion model provides an inaccurate picture of technoscience, because it fails to account for the conscious agency of the technoscientists themselves. The book is well-stocked with examples of scientific and technological progress explained in terms of the people who linked their fates to a particular theory or invention: General Data's Tom West in Soul Of A New Machine, Rudolf Diesel's engine (and the MAN engineers and mechanics who eventually made it work), and the hypothetical "boss" of a biology laboratory.

Latour also shows how a social division between an inside (within the lab) and an outside (out in the world) make scientific and technical work possible. It is necessary to follow both to make any sense of "where" science happens: the outside supports the inside, allowing it to specialize, channeling funding, equipment, and personnel into the lab by enlisting and guiding the self-interest of universities, governments, and foundations towards to the interests of the lab itself. At the same time, the inside justifies the outside, producing results (process, technology) that fulfills the interests of those outside. On the boundary between the inside and outside sits the boss-figure, the scientist or engineer who motivates the lab and fights for its continued survival. "Firefighter up, cheerleader down" as my friend and first boss Darren used to say.

Science In Action has been quite a ride, and I've tried to apply its observations to my own company in a number of ways. For one, it has been instructive to think in terms of inside/outside with our activities, switching between "doing the work" and "talking about the work", having people specialize in one but not the other, and recognizing the importance of aligning the broader world's interests with our own. The time this becomes unusually rewarding are probably more frequent than we rightfully deserve: months of digging deep into nothing by maps, followed by a string of projects focused on images or time. It means we can juggle a lot of balls in the air without everyone fragmenting off into their own private corners. I've also recently sat in on the standards process behind OAuth, and have tried to judge it by Latour's translation model to see where good ideas were being moved about through conscious alignment of many groups' self-interests. I found this quite instructive.

Latour also has a way of describing the idea of a black box that resonates deeply. When I think back to my first visits to San Francisco (upper Haight when in High School, Bahia Cabana, the Mission, and downtown early in college), the city had not yet solidified in my mind, and I encountered each neighborhood on its own terms without a clear understand of how they fit together. The process by which novelty is transformed into familiarity and later background marks the passage of time. Sometimes it'd be nice to unlearn things at will.

Pages 91-92, on reification:

All biologists now take 'protein' for an object; they do not remember the time, in the 1920s, when protein was a whitish stuff that was separated by a new ultracentrifuge in Svedberg's laboratory. At the time protein was nothing but the action of differentiating cell contents by a centrifuge. Routine use however transforms the naming of an actant after what it does into a common name. This process is not mysterious or special to science. It is the same with the can opener we routinely use in our kitchen. We consider the opener and the skill to handle it as one black box which means that it is unproblematic and does not require planning and attention. We forget the many trials we had to go through (blood, scars, spilled beans and ravioli, shouting parent) before we handled it properly, anticipated the weight of the can, the reactions of the opener, the resistance of the tin.

Page 107, on phasing:

If the notion of discrete phases is useless, so, too, is that of trajectory. It does not describe anything since it is again one of the problems to be solved. Diesel indeed claimed that there was one trajectory which links his seminal patent to real engines. This is the only way for his patents to be 'seminal'. But this was disputed by hundreds of engineers claiming that the engine's ancestry was different. Anyway, if Diesel was so sure of his offspring, then why not call it a Carnot engine since it is from Carnot that he took the original idea? But since the original patent never worked, why not call it a MAN engine, or, a constant pressure air injection engine? We see that talking in phases in a trajectory is like taking slices from a pâté made from hundreds of morsels of meat. Although it might be palatable, it has no relation whatsoever to the natural joints of the animal.

Page 137, on cameras and black boxes:

Let us remember Eastman's Kodak camera. It was simpler to operate than anything else before. 'Push the button, we'll do the rest,' they said. But they had to do the rest, and that was quite a lot. The simplification of the camera that made it possible to interest everyone in its dissemination in millions of copies had to be obtained by the extension and complication of Eastman's commercial network. When you push the button you do not see the salesmen and the machines that make long strips of celluloid films and the troubleshooters that make the coating stick properly at last; you do not see them, but they have to be there none the less. If they are not, you push the button and nothing happens. ... If we have understood this, then we may draw the conclusions from the two first parts of this chapter: the black box moves in space and becomes durable in time only through the actions of many people; if there is no one to take it up, it stops and falls apart however many people may have taken it up for however long before. But the type, number, and qualifications of the people in the chain will be modified: inventors like Diesel or Eastman, engineers, mechanics, salesmen, and maybe 'ignorant customers' in the end. To sum up, there are always people moving the objects along but they are not the same people all along.

Page 141, on diffusion vs. translation and why society is a fiction:

Among all the features that differ in the two models, one is especially important, that is society. In the diffusion model society is made up of groups which have interests; these groups resist, accept, or ignore both facts and machines, which have their own inertia. In consequence we have science and technics on the one hand, and a society on the other. In the translation model, however, no such distinction exists since there are only heterogeneous chains of associations that, from time to time, create obligatory passage points. Let us go further: belief in the existence of a society separated from technoscience is an outcome of the diffusion model. Once facts and machines have been endowed with their own inertia, and once the collective action of human and non-human actors tied together has been forgotten or pushed aside, then you have to make up a society to explain why facts and machines do not spread.

Page 152, on specialization and isolation:

...an isolated specialist is a contradiction in terms. Either you are isolated and very quickly stop being a specialist, or you remain a specialist but this means you are not isolated. Other, who are as specialized as you, are trying out your material so fiercely that they may push the proof race to a point where are of your resources are barely enough to win the encounter. A specialist is a counter-specialist in the same way as a technical article is a counter-articles (Chapter 1) or a laboratory is a counter-laboratory (Chapter 2).

Page 155, defining outside and inside:

This case shows how important it is to decide who are the people to study. Depending on which scientist is followed, completely different pictures of technoscience will emerge. Simply shadowing West or the boss will offer a businessman's view of science (mixture of politics, negotiation of contracts, public relations); shadowing the microkids or the collaborators will provide the classic view of hard-working white-coated scientists wrapped up in their experiments. In the first case we would be constantly moving outside the laboratory; in the second, we would stay deep inside the laboratory. Who is really doing research? Where is the research really done?

Page 156, more on inside and outside:

The first lesson to be drawn from these examples is rather innocuous: technoscience has an inside because it has an outside. There is a positive feedback loop in this innocuous definition: the bigger, the harder, the purer science is inside, the further outside other scientists have to go. It is because of this feedback that, if you get inside a laboratory, you see no public relations, no politics, no ethical problems, no class struggle, no lawyers; you see science isolated from society. But this isolation exists only in so far as other scientists are constantly busy recruiting investors, interesting and convincing people.

Pages 231-232, on modeling space and time:

Professor Bijker takes a metre-long plaster model of a new dam, fixes it into place and launches a first round of tides shortened to twelve minutes; then he takes it out, tries another one and continues. Sure enough, another 'Copernican revolution' has taken place. There are not that many ways to master a situation. Either you dominate it physically; or you draw on your side a great many allies; or else, you try to be there before anybody else. How can this be done? Simply by reversing the flow of time. Professor Bijker and his colleagues dominate the problem, master it more easily than the port officials who are out there in the rain and are much smaller than the landscape. Whatever may happen in the full-scall space-time, the engineers will have already seen it. They will also have become slowly acquainted with all the possibilities, rehearsing each scenario at leisure, capitalising on paper possible outcomes, which gives them years of experience more than others. The order of time and space has been completely reshuffled. Do they talk with more authority and more certainty than the workmen building the real dam there? Well, of course, since they have already made all possible blunders and mistakes, safely inside the wooden hall in Delft, consuming only plaster and a few salaries along the way, inadvertently flooding not millions of hard-working Dutch but dozens of metres of concrete floor.

Pages 248-249, where it all breaks down:

When the architects, urbanists and energeticians in charge of the Frangocastello solar village project in Crete had finished their calculations in early 1980 they had in their office, in Athens, a complete paper scale model of the village. They knew everything available about Crete: solar energy, weather patterns, local demography, water resources, economic trends, concrete structures and agriculture in greenhouses. They had rehearsed and discussed every possible configuration with the best engineers in the world and had triggered the enthusiasm of many European, American, and Greek development banks by settling on an optimal and original prototype. Like Cape Canaveral engineers the had simply to go 'out there' and apply their calculations, proving once again the quasi-supernatural power of scientists. When they sent their engineers from Athens to Frangocastello to start expropriating property and smoothing out the little details, they met with a totally unexpected 'outside'. Not only were the inhabitants not ready to abandon their lands in exchange for houses in the new village, but they were ready to fight with their rifles against what they took as a new American atomic military base camouflaged under a solar energy village. The application of the theory became harder every day as the mobilisation of opposition grew in strength, enrolling the pope and the Socialist Party. It soon became obvious that, since the army could not be sent to force Cretans to occupy willingly the future prototype, a negotiation had to start between the inside and the outside. But how could they strike a compromise between a brand new solar village and a few hundred shepherds who simply wanted three kilometres of asphalted road and a gas station? The compromise was to abandon the solar village altogether. All the planning of the energeticians was routed back inside the network and limited to a paper scale model, another one of the many projects engineers have in their drawers. The 'out-thereness' had given a fatal blow to this example of science.

Page 249, networks and a conclusion by way of prediction:

So how is it that in some cases science's predictions are fulfilled and in some other cases pitifully fail? The rule of method to apply here is rather straightforward: every time you hear about a successful application of science, look for the progressive extension of a network. Every time you hear about a failure of science, look for what part of which network has been punctured. I bet you will always find it.

Originally posted by (author unknown) from tecznotes, on November 19, 2007 11:03 PM

As regards the product, I have nothing to add to Mark Pilgrim’s The Future of Reading (A Play in Six Acts). But the big meta-news story here is: PR Triumph. The product, it’s Yet Another E-Book Reader. It got on the front cover of Newsweek and was featured by more or less everyone in the mainstream-media technology beat. It bloody well got onto the front page of my hometown Vancouver Sun. Maybe the product will soar, maybe it’ll flop. But this is obviously the crowning PR achievement of our young century. I bow my head in awe.

Originally posted by (author unknown) from ongoing, on November 19, 2007 11:00 PM

Because I'm just that nice, let me let you all in on a pizza-dough-making secret I seem to have just figured out, despite having made my own pizza dough for going on two years now. Scratch that -- before last week, I thought I was making pizza dough, but it turns out I was making something that was related to pizza dough only via two marriages and three step-cousins. What did I learn? That when nearly every recipe tells you to slowly add your yeast/water mix to your flour, they're all smoking crack -- the key appears to be the exact opposite, slowly adding the flour to the water. Making that one change has led to two of the best pizza crusts I've ever made.

So, my standard (honey wheat) pizza dough recipe now stands as:

• three cups of King Arthur unbleached, all-purpose flour
• one cup of King Arthur traditional whole wheat flour
• one packet of Red Star active dry yeast
• one and a half cups of hot (110°) water
• two tablespoons of honey
• two teaspoons of salt

I start off by putting the honey in the bottom of a bowl that's big enough to eventually hold all the ingredients, and then I add the water and stir it around a little bit to dissolve all the honey. I then slowly sprinkle the yeast on top of the liquid, stirring it in a little bit with a fork as I sprinkle. I set this aside and set a timer for 10 minutes, glancing over every now and then to make sure that a frothy layer is forming atop the liquid (showing that the yeast is doing its thing). While that's going on, I measure my flour out into a smaller bowl and mix it up a bit so that the wheat and white is distributed throughout. (Remember to measure your flour correctly!)

Once the 10 minutes is up, I add my salt to the yeast/honey/water mixture, and then start slowly adding in flour. I begin by adding just a little bit and stirring the mixture around with the fork; after the flour is stirred in, I add a bit more, stir a bit more, and continue that process until the mixture approximates the consistency of pancake batter. (At this point, I've used around 2/3 of the flour.) I keep adding the flour slowly, but at this point it takes a little bit of care to make sure that each time I add any flour it gets mixed in as well as possible, a process ends up taking another minute or two before I'm done. At the end of it all, I'm left with the result that eluded me these past two years, a dough ball that's soft and stretchy throughout, easily kneadable, and soft as the proverbial baby's bottom.

Finally, I hand-knead the ball of dough for 15 minutes, put it into an olive oil-coated bowl, and cover it with a damp cloth to rise for an hour or so. (If I have time, I punch it down and let it rise another 30-45 minutes, although I'm not convinced that this changes things a lot.) At the end, I cut the dough ball in half, freeze one part of it, and make pizza with the other! (Just to complete the recipe, I make all my pizzas with fresh mozzarella, and I swear by Rebecca's no-cook pizza sauce.)

As I said, I've been extremely happy with this recipe, so much so that I wonder if some trick was being played with me for the past two years' worth of subpar pizza dough. From start of ingredient prep to the end of kneading, it takes me just around 30 minutes; I'm hopeful that now that I have it perfected, I'll continue to put the time in even after the baby comes in March!

(with comments)

Originally posted by Jason from Q Daily News, on November 19, 2007 5:29 PM

Cory Doctorow: The Future of Internet Immune Systems. "Our network defenses are automated, instantaneous, and sweeping. But our fallback and oversight systems are slow, understaffed, and unresponsive." This could also describe Google.

Originally posted by Wes Felter from Hack the Planet, on November 19, 2007 5:17 PM

Deb of Smitten Kitchen points out that fresh nutmeg innards looks like brain folds. Mm!...

...Euh.

Originally posted by Robyn Lee from Serious Eats: Main, on November 19, 2007 3:15 PM

The Celebrate People's History posters are included in a new exhibition organized by The Production Unit called The Long Distance Runner. The show is at Den Frie Udstillingsbygning in Copenhagen, Denmark. If you are in Denmark, definitely check it out, they are deeply influenced by one of my favorite filmmakers, Peter Watkins. Here's some info on the show from the curators: The Production Unit is a network of artists from Sweden and Denmark working with narrative experiments, the construction of history and media critique. The exhibition at Den Frie Udstillingsbygning will be the first public presentation of their archive THE The Long Distance Runner, which includes both collaborative and individual projects as well as works by a number of other international artists. The show is part of Den Frie Udstillingsbygning’s focus on self-organisation and collectivism and gives an example of how a group of younger artists works collaboratively across languages and nationalities. The artists of The Production Unit are Petra Bauer, Nanna Debois Buhl, Kajsa Dahlberg, Sara Jordenö, Conny Karlsson, Runo Lagomarsino and Ditte Lyngkjær Pedersen. The Long Distance Runner is comprised of projects, which in various ways discuss current political and cultural questions as well as historical events. The different parts constitute a series of discussions related to communities and publics with emphasis on questions concerning nationality, identity and language. The material varies in form covering video installations, poster projects, sound-based work, photography and various publications produced by the members of the group and artists as Josh MacPhee, Carlos Motta, Jenny Perlin, Hito Steyerl and Ylva Westerlund. A central part of the presentation of The Long Distance Runner is Peter Watkins film La Commune from 1999. Through its’ controversial form the film challenges prevailing notions of documentary film experimenting with an unconventional way of discussing the historical event of the Paris Commune in 1871 and the relationship between subject, community and revolutionary action. The exhibition is open daily from 10am to 5pm Thursday 10am to 9pm Free guided tours Saturday and Sunday at 3pm Den Frie Udstillingsbygning Oslo Plads DK-2100 København Ø Tlf. +45 3312 2803 www.denfrie.dk

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Just Seeds: Blog, on November 19, 2007 2:46 PM

Silhouettes of patrons at the American Museum of Natural History by NYC photographer Joe Holmes. Joe also has a nice photo of the Manhattan Bridge up today on his photoblog.

(link)

Originally posted by (author unknown) from kottke.org, on November 19, 2007 1:37 PM

The Art of Quitting. A collaborative web site by and for cigarette smokers to post images that inspire them to quit.

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Social Design Notes, on November 19, 2007 1:01 PM

From this weekend's "Adventures with Tivo," Charlie Rose had Javier Bardem, Josh Brolin and the Coen brothers on to discuss No Country for Old Men. Worth the time, even though it's, you know, Charlie Rose.

Originally posted by Michael Sippey from (un)filtered, on November 19, 2007 12:12 PM

Super Mario Bros.: The Lost Levels reviewed. - By Chris Suellentrop - Slate Magazine this sounds great

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Cory's Web LOG, on November 19, 2007 12:08 PM

StreetFilms joined up with Transportation Alternatives' Executive Director, Paul Steely White to talk about congestion pricing with express bus commuters in Bay Ridge. Bus riders told White that they'd like to have more buses and a faster commute. One commuter pointed out that virtually every automobile on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway carries just one person.

Another bus rider pretty well summed it up with this:

Congestion pricing would be $8 for cars. I pay $10 every day to get into and out of the city -- on a bus. Sometimes that bus isn't on time, sometimes it takes me three times as long as it should. I don't see what the problem is with other people paying.

If congestion pricing is approved, New York City will receive a $354.5 million federal grant that will be used to put 367 new buses on 36 routes in 22 neighborhoods as well as additional funds for the ferry and ferry improvements.

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Originally posted by Jason Varone from Streetsblog, on November 19, 2007 11:23 AM

AAPL has been added to a short list of stocks picked to show big gains this quarter. The question then becomes: how high will it go?

Read More...

Originally posted by cjade@arstechnica.com (Charles Jade) from Infinite Loop, on November 19, 2007 10:58 AM

Jon Hicks has a nice slideshow of typography from the Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. (via waxy) Design Observer did a piece on the typography of Order of the Phoenix becoming its own character.

It is The Daily Prophet which emerges in this film as a secondary character, performing interstitial cameos made all the more exhilarating because the camera sweeps in and out, ricocheting off the page, magnifying and dramatizing a typographic vocabulary that combines a slightly mottled, letterpress-like display face with great portions of illegible calligraphy.

(link)

Originally posted by (author unknown) from kottke.org, on November 19, 2007 9:20 AM

Recorded at the LIFT Conference, Geneva: Sugata Mitra discusses his "Hole in the Wall" project in India, which proved that kids, without education or instruction, can figure out how to use a PC on their own -- and then teach other kids. Given this, he asks, what else can children teach themselves? (Recorded January 2007 in Geneva, Switzerland. Duration: 20:59.)

The LIFT Conference is an annual conference taking place in Geneva, Switzerland, with satellites in other regions of the world, intended to facilitate and promote discussion about new technologies and their impact on society.

Watch Sugata Mitra's talk on TED.com, where you can download it, rate it, comment on it and find other talks and performances.

Read more about Sugata Mitra on TED.com.

Embed this video: Use this code to run the video on your own site:

Originally posted by (author unknown) from TED | TEDBlog, on November 19, 2007 9:00 AM

Everyone has heard of I Can't Believe It's Not Butter!, the margarine spread with the memorably comical name. While there are many butter substitutes gracing our grocery store shelves (oh yes, how they make my stomach juices flow), I assumed that this was the only product that used the word "butter" to market its superiority over other butter substitutes through its fascinating ability to be mistaken for real butter.

But my world of fake butter (population: 1) was turned upside-down when I read Elyse Sewell's livejournal entry documenting curious products from her local supermarket, including two more I Can't Believe It's Not Butter!-like products: Butter It's Not! and Could It Be Butter? I found these names just as amusing as I Can't Believe It's Not Butter, possibly more so, but googling their names showed that the Internet didn't really give a damn about these other products. While I Can't Believe It's Not Butter returned 95,100 results, Butter It's Not returned 1,760 results and Could It Be Butter? brought up the rear with a paltry 186 results.

I came across a few other fake butter products with peculiar names. Check out the full gallery after the jump.

Photograph taken by Elyse Sewell

Butter It's Not!: As scottbateman said, "By Yoda was named."

Photograph taken by Elyse Sewell

Could it be Butter?: I imagine a misguided consumer saying this name in a hopeful tone: "Could it be butter? Oh please, for the love of God, could it be?..." and then falling into a heap of disappointment when they realize it's not butter.

Photograph taken by prettyandhigh

What, not butter!: Shouldn't this be a question!

Photograph from Wm Jas on Flickr

Unbelieveable This is not butter: Although this product is from Taiwan, I think with a few additional exclamation marks and more appealing packaging this name could catch on in the US.

Image from FoodFacts.com

Move Over Butter: It's so good, it drives farmers to sing with their cows. If that's what you're looking for.

I came across a few other names for fake butter products—Is It Really Butter? ("Nope, fooled ya!") and Too Good To Be Butter ("Doubtful!")—but I have no visual evidence to back this up. If you've ever seen these products or have other names to toss into the ring, please let me know.

Originally posted by Robyn Lee from Serious Eats: Main, on November 19, 2007 9:00 AM

We have about a case left of the Orin Swift Prisoner, and in honor of it having made the Spectator’s top 20 we thought we’d do the opposite of some other folks and LOWER the price rather than raise it. This week only, it can be yours for $28.99 a bottle.Take a prison break…

Originally posted by admin from domaine547, on November 19, 2007 8:47 AM

Opening this week at http://www.ifccenter.com/ is It Is Fine! Everything Is Fine!, the second part of Crispin Hellion Glover’s “It” trilogy, which is based on the screenplay and sinister musings of the late Steven C. Stewart, who was afflicted with severe cerebral palsy and also stars in the film. Steven plays wheelchair-bound Paul, who meets a divorced mother (played by Fassbinder goddess Margit Carstensen) at a dance and then introduces him to her family (her sexy daughter takes a particular shine to him). Paul is obsessed with long hair and The Sound Of Music, but when his offer of marriage to the mother is rejected, he reacts in homicidal rage. Leave it to Crispin Glover to remake My Left Foot as an avant-garde horror movie. Art direction by Glover’s co-director David Brothers creates streets and apartment interiors of hallucinatory luridness. That, mixed with the thunderous soundtrack of Grieg and Tchaikovsky give the movie a relentless nightmare quality resembling the Italian Giallo film that also reveled in kinky sex and murder. Actress Lauren German plays a handicapped girl that Paul meets and tries to woo, but she dreams of dating someone not using a ramp. The only clues cops have to Paul’s series of murders are bent sippy straws. There is also a graphic sex scene that will keep this movie from ever becoming an event screening at the Special Olympics. Compared to Glover’s first film, What Is It? (2005), this surreal fantasy is marvelously macabre and narratively more cohesive. What Diane Arbus was as a photographer, Crispin Hellion Glover is swiftly achieving as a filmmaker. Training his sardonic eyes on the strange and afflicted, he achieves a mad dark poetry on celluloid.

Originally posted by (author unknown) from PAPERMAG: WORD UP!, on November 19, 2007 8:07 AM

I want a proper e-book reader as much as anyone, but Amazon's Kindle sounds underwhelming (and unfortunately looks, as a friend put it, like "the Pontiac Aztec of e-readers"). Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos says:

This isn't a device, it's a service.

That's CEO-speak for "yay, we can charge you for buying this gadget again and again". That emphasis makes it seem like the Kindle is less of a "read any text you want on the go" device and more of an interface for purchasing Amazon's e-books, e-magazines, and blogs (yes, they're charging for blogs somehow...). E-ink is a genuine innovation but until someone without some skin in the media game takes a good crack at it, e-book readers are destined to be buying machines and not reading machines.

Update: Here's a list of all the blogs that Amazon is selling for reading on the Kindle. Subscriptions are $0.99-$1.99. No kottke.org (thanks, Amazon!!). Are the bloggers getting their cut of the subscription fees? Can I put kottke.org on there for free...or at least at cost? I suspect bloggers are getting a cut, with the rest taken by Amazon for profit and the conversion of the blogs' text into whatever goofy format the Kindle uses. Would have been a lot cooler to put an RSS reader on there and just let people read whatever blogs they wanted.

(link)

Originally posted by (author unknown) from kottke.org, on November 19, 2007 7:44 AM

Realizing that it's generally considered passé if not altogether wacky to talk about New York City transportation policy and politics in the context of global energy business, a Wall Street Journal story this morning confirms that global fossil fuel production appears to be hitting a plateau. In other words, Peak Oil is no longer a crazy idea. From this morning's paper:

A growing number of oil-industry chieftains are endorsing an idea long deemed fringe: The world is approaching a practical limit to the number of barrels of crude oil that can be pumped every day.

Some predict that, despite the world's fast-growing thirst for oil, producers could hit that ceiling as soon as 2012. This rough limit -- which two senior industry officials recently pegged at about 100 million barrels a day -- is well short of global demand projections over the next few decades. Current production is about 85 million barrels a day.

The world certainly won't run out of oil any time soon. And plenty of energy experts expect sky-high prices to hasten the development of alternative fuels and improve energy efficiency. But evidence is mounting that crude-oil production may plateau before those innovations arrive on a large scale. That could set the stage for a period marked by energy shortages, high prices and bare-knuckled competition for fuel.

The outstanding Oil Drum blog also notes two related but extremely wonky studies by Stuart Staniford and Sam Foucher. The studies suggest that daily production from the world's biggest oil fields are declining at a much faster rate than previously projected.

All of which is to say, yet again, the faster that New York City can reduce its dependence on gas-guzzling cars and trucks, the better off we'll likely be.

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Originally posted by Aaron Naparstek from Streetsblog, on November 19, 2007 7:27 AM

Ever since my Participatory Design class with Liz Sanders (http://www.maketools.com/), I’ve been dreaming of an online collaging application. Whenever I found myself scouring Flickr for hundreds of mood board or collage images or designing a diary study for remote users, the thought popped into my mind again: Why isn’t there an online collaging tool?

The one tool that seemed to have potential was in beta forever, but when I checked in the other day, I found that Scrapblog is up and working beautifully! After playing with it briefly, I was impressed. I’d found the tool I’d been looking for!

The Flex-powered interface is intuitive and fluidly responsive…

The vast collection of backgrounds and stickers express a broad diversity of moods and styles and have an Apple-caliber elegance…

You can easily import content from Flickr (and other external sites)…

And the potential for using it with participatory design research methods seems great…

Collage Activities and Mood Boards

Imagine: Instead of printing out dozens of pages of images, which still limits your research participant to whatever you’ve selected, you can open up the entire Flickr universe to the participant to create their collage. Or, if you want the participant to choose from pre-selected images, you can create a Flickr gallery and ask the participant to draw from those.

Remote Participatory Design

The interface is pretty intuitive, so with little explaining, you can now conduct collage exercises with remote research participants. While it’s unfortunately not a collaborative interface (where multiple people can work on the same collage simultaneously and see updates dynamically), it’s easier than constructing and mailing participant a collage kit! (I’d love to see some collaborative functionality built in though.)

Diary Studies

Multiple page “scrapblogs” (which are actually what the site is designed to produce) can easily be created and published both publicly and privately. I can see scrapblogs being used for or supplementing diary studies, allowing participants to tell their experience stories in a fun and creativity-inducing way.

Optimistic about this tool’s possibilities, I did a little mock study with my 15-year-old sister. I sent her a link to Scrapblog and no more instruction than, “Create a collage about MySpace and a collage about Facebook.”

In closing, I’ll share the clever creation she sent back:

View on Scrapblog

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Originally posted by Alexa from Adaptive Path, on November 19, 2007 7:04 AM

The bulk of effort and discussion in the field of experience design revolves the design of systems to support people in what they want to do. We talk about touchpoints, and how to coordinate between the Web, the phone, and in-store. We talk about the importance of consistency in labeling. We talk a lot about the design of interactive systems, largely because those interactive systems are meant to serve in the stead of people (we just finished an in-store kiosk project whose primary purpose was to help people find merchandise in the store, because there simply aren’t enough staff to go around).

But any sufficiently involved service experience will involve interactions with staff. There will be questions, unexpected needs to coordinate, or just general confusion that can only be addressed by other people. And, as Adam pointed out in his excellent essay on experience design, it’s those interactions with staff that usually end up torpedoing an experience. Surly staff, clueless staff, aggressive staff, obstructionist staff — we as customers have dealt with them all.

That’s why I really appreciate this piece on what it’s like to work on the front lines of retail. That is where the experience design rubber meets the commerce road (excuse the extended metaphor). And as with so many things in this space, Apple gets it. I think the key is actually in the very beginning — Apple (and the Container Store) make sure that people have a true passion for the product. If you hire the wrong people, all the training in the world won’t make them right. Not to dismiss the importance of training — Apple seems to do an excellent job there, too.

Anyway, understanding the role that staff play in delivering a customer experience, and how to design training for that staff, seems like a huge untapped opportunity for experience designers.

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Originally posted by peterme from Adaptive Path, on November 19, 2007 7:01 AM

Has Abe Lincoln been discovered in the background of a pair of photographs taken right before the Gettysburg Address?

The new photos are enlarged details from much wider crowd shots; they were discovered by a Civil War hobbyist earlier this year in the vast trove of Library of Congress photographs digitized since 2000, and provided to USA Today. They show a figure believed to be Lincoln, white-gloved and in his trademark stovepipe hat, in a military procession.

The funny thing is, if you look at a similar photograph of Lincoln taken shortly after his speech, there are at least three men seated around him who are wearing stovepipe hats. The photographic evidence alone is not compelling. "Paging Errol Morris. Would Errol Morris please come to the information desk. Thank you."

(link)

Originally posted by (author unknown) from kottke.org, on November 19, 2007 6:02 AM

This is a bit of a thought piece I've been meaning to write up for some time, that brings together two different seemingly different events -- that is until Anil Dash posed an interesting idea.

Back in Sepetember, not long after MT4 and the iPhone shipped, Six Apart announced the release of iMT, a plugin specially designed user interface for Movable Type 4.0 users to access their installation via their iPhone or iPod Touch.

About the same time, over on the ProNet mailing list, a somewhat heated discussion of the merits and demerits (mostly the demerits) regarding the new interface unveiled in MT4. The complaints where varied and at times conflicting (go figure), but for the most part I categorize them as the new interface being:

• Too heavy -- the MT4 uses is too much CSS and JavaScript files.
• Too busy -- the MT4 interface is too colorful, hard on the eyes, over done, gradients suck, icons not clear etc. etc.

There is a lot of good in the new interface, but there is some credence to the gripes that were aired. I admit to contributing some of them.

Long into the conversation, Anil Dash asked if anyone had tried using iMT as a basic lightweight interface for everyday authors.

An interesting thought! I had not tried and though my wife owns an iPod Touch chances are I'd have to peel it from her dead fingers to use it. (I jest, but you get the idea.)

Things is if you try to use iMT from your desktop browser -- well you can't. Not without some hacking. While an intruiging idea with some potential, in practice it's tricky and requires some hacking to even try. For most developers this is a non-starter unless they have developer skills.

While I have the kills, I just haven't gotten around to even skimming over it until recently. The rest of this post is a summary of my observations and notes during this experiment.

The biggest problem in testing iMT 1.0 without an iPod Touch or iPhone it that iMT loads itself into MT itself, rather then as a separate script, and filters requests based on the browser user agent being MobileSafari. Install iMT and point FireFox or IE or even Safari at MT and nothing happens. Everything is the same. You need to hack the code a bit to remove the browser detection code that override the rich "fat client" interface.

The hack is pretty simple really as long as you are bit careful. You comment out (add the # symbol to the start of the line) of three lines in the init_request method of mt/plugins/iMT/iMT.pl as follows:

#    if ((( $ua =~ m!AppleWebKit/! ) && ( $ua =~ m!Mobile/! )) ||
#         ( $ua =~ m!Opera Mini/!)) {
        $enabled = 1;

        # Redirect 'dashboard' or 'default' modes to iphone_main
        $app->mode('iphone_main')
            if ($app->mode eq 'default') || ($app->mode eq 'dashboard');

        $app->config('AltTemplatePath', $plugin->path . '/tmpl');
#    }

IMPORTANT NOTE: Doing this will temporarily mess-up the standard MT interface for ALL users. You'll want to try this out on a sandbox -- preferably one that you are only going to use.

With that you can run the stripped down mobile browser interface. While I was able to mostly see and work with the interface using any browser you really should try and stick to Safari. (Why in a bit.)

With that in place, I gave using iMT a try. I worked though I wouldn't recommend using it for everyday use in its current state. What follows are my observations and notes.

• Running in the average size desktop browser window the proportion is all off. It would be comical if it didn't look so off. Creating bookmarklet to launch the iMT interface in a pop-up size window like MT uses for publishing would help.

• Safari only. Some buttons such as the entry delete button vanishes in Firefox 2. Didn't look too good in Safari 2. Fields don't have border either.

• iMT can't handle assets aka uploading a file. Not sure this is a big deal (agreed?), but its work noting.

• The rest of MT gets "hosed." As mentioned earlier, with the browser detection code removed all other screens will appear broken to ALL users. iMT replaces the MT system styles. Since iMT uses mostly different CSS identifiers leaving the standard interface mostly unstyled and unusable. Personally I would have designed iMT as a seperate script so the Apple mobile device interface had a separate URL from the desktop browser interface. Browser detecting is "too cute" for my tastes and creates the potential break overtime, besides a companies like Google and Yahoo have established the convention of using a different URL to access the mobile interface to their apps.

While numerous questions remain and there are many issues to sort out for the iMT plugin to be used as a lightweight/basic interface to MT, there clearly in potential. The interface actually makes its look further off then it is.

Looking at the code and considering what in my experience such an interface would need, iMT wouldn't be a wouldn't be a radical departure. I'm not sure if the needs of both uses (Apple Mobile and MT simple interface) can be and should be addressed in one plugin though I hesitate to suggest a fork wither.

Is there a demand for a lightweight MT browser interface for basics that only addresses the most common everyday function of weblog author? What is missing from the iMT functionality? Is anything not needed?

Leave your thoughts in the comments.

Originally posted by Timothy Appnel from Code / Appnel Solutions, on November 19, 2007 5:00 AM

This wasn't meant to be Tyler Cowen day on kottke.org, but you need to check out this concise barnburner of an article written by Cowen for the Washington Post on the cost of the war in Iraq. Taking the form of a letter to President Bush, the article explores the opportunity costs of the war and then offers the real reason why the war has been disastrous:

In fact, Mr. President, your initial pro-war arguments offer the best path toward understanding why the conflict has been such a disaster for U.S. interests and global security.

Following your lead, Iraq hawks argued that, in a post-9/11 world, we needed to take out rogue regimes lest they give nuclear or biological weapons to al-Qaeda-linked terrorist groups. But each time the United States tries to do so and fails to restore order, it incurs a high -- albeit unseen -- opportunity cost in the future. Falling short makes it harder to take out, threaten or pressure a dangerous regime next time around.

Foreign governments, of course, drew the obvious lesson from our debacle -- and from our choice of target. The United States invaded hapless Iraq, not nuclear-armed North Korea. To the real rogues, the fall of Baghdad was proof positive that it's more important than ever to acquire nuclear weapons -- and if the last superpower is bogged down in Iraq while its foes slink toward getting the bomb, so much the better. Iran, among others, has taken this lesson to heart. The ironic legacy of the war to end all proliferation will be more proliferation.

As a refreshing mint, check out the length of the y-axis on this graph comparing the cost of the war and the amount spent by the US govt on energy R&D. (thx, ivan)

Originally posted by (author unknown) from kottke.org, on November 19, 2007 3:27 AM

Tyler Cowen of Marginal Revolution loves his iPhone and "can no longer imagine not having one" but has yet to make a phone call with it.

(link)

Originally posted by (author unknown) from kottke.org, on November 19, 2007 2:38 AM

a full-size, 374-page reproduction of the entire 2007 IKEA catalogue, reduced & abstracted to only averaged color & lay-out structure.

with an estimated 175 million copies distributed in 2006, the IKEA catalogue is thought to have surpassed the Bible as the most published printed work in the world. this group of 3 projects (374 Farben, Field Guide to Style, and Color & Catalogue) transforms that ubiquity of design into "varied pure color arrangements".

[link: salavon.com]

see also: google project averaging & playboy centerfold averaging & sorting image pixels.

Originally posted by (author unknown) from information aesthetics, on November 19, 2007 1:44 AM

Not sure when it happened (my best bet is that it came along with Gmail “v2.0”), but Gmail’s filtering system now (finally!) allows you to automatically “mark as read,” something I’ve been clamoring for since jump.

I get various e-mails that I never really need to see, and before this recent addition, I couldn’t automatically mark them as read, which meant I needed to manually perform some action on them even though I didn’t care at all about their actual content.

For example, I get a weekly e-mail from WordPress containing a complete backup of my posts (using the WordPress Database Backup plugin); I take it on faith that the plugin is doing its job each week and so I don’t need to see these e-mails. The same goes for student loan payment confirmations, which, until now, required me to constantly go to their label/folder and manually mark them as read.

You can understand how this inefficiency could drive me up a wall (OK, maybe you can’t understand that, but no matter!). Now I can receive, skip inbox, apply label, and mark as read, all without ever having to see or even know about the e-mail.

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Justin Blanton, on November 19, 2007 1:17 AM

Ten new things in WebKit 3.

Apple’s site can tell you a lot about the new end-user features of Safari 3. But a lot of the goodness is on the inside, in the WebKit engine that powers Safari. Here’s a list of ten of the most exciting engine enhancements since the Safari 2 version of WebKit, with lots of details and demos.

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Justin Blanton, on November 19, 2007 1:14 AM

fig. a: l-r: goose, Picard, Laprise

More thoughts on this later, but if you haven't had a chance to see Guillaume Sylvestre's Durs à cuire, his practically brand-new documentary on Montreal's two reigning culinary dons, Normand Laprise and Martin Picard, the free weeklies tell me that there's only one cinema left in town that's still playing it: Cinéma Beaubien (original French version, no subtitles).

Those of you who haven't had the pleasure yet and are still hemming and hawing (should I see it now while it's still on the silver screen? should I just wait till it comes out on DVD?) might want to know that if you go, you can see our very own Michelle lighting up the screen. Sure, Laprise and Picard, and their two chefs de cuisine, Charles-Antoine Crête and Hugue Dufour, have gotten most of the press, and justly so, but the film features a cast of supporting characters that's a virtual who's who, including Joe Beef's Fred Morin, Xavier Pellicer from Barcelona's Àbac, Nicolas Le Bec from Lyon's Restaurant Nicolas Le Bec, and, yes, Michelle.

All right, it's not much more than a cameo, really--a non-speaking cameo--but, yep, there she is.

Okay, truth be told, it's not even really a cameo, it's just a pan--and a fast one at that. You'd have to a) know what Michelle looks like and b) be paying very close attention. Actually, it'd make for a pretty good game--Where's Michelle?--except that she only shows up once, and only for an instant.

Have fun.

Cinéma Beaubien, 2396 rue Beaubien E., 721-6060

aj

Originally posted by michelle from ...an endless banquet, on November 18, 2007 2:05 PM

Mike Huckabee has a new one-minute TV spot, featuring his most famous endorser ??? Chuck Norris:

Originally posted by Eric Kleefeld from Election Central, on November 18, 2007 6:08 AM

Ever since we started putting TEDTalks online in July 2006, all of the talks and performances on TED.com -- more than 160 so far -- were recorded at a TED event: at our annual gathering in Monterey; at TEDGlobal in Oxford, UK, and Arusha, Tanzania; or during one of our TED Salons.

Now we join some very good company in a new phase of global idea sharing. Starting this week, we will begin releasing selected talks recorded at other conferences around the world. We are particularly happy that four important conferences have partnered with us to share ideas through TED.com. They are:

+ the DLD (Digital Life Design) conference (January, Munich, Germany)
+ the LIFT Conference (February, Geneva, Switzerland)
+ the Skoll World Forum on Social Entrepreneurship (March, Oxford, UK)
+ the Picnic conference (September, Amsterdam, The Netherlands)

These are very diverse gatherings, attracting diverse audiences. Yet they all have at their core the same intention: They bring together bright minds to share ideas and ignite action. They take place in Europe, but are globally minded. We're proud to be partnering with them. This week, watch for talks by Indian self-education theorist Sugata Mitra, "continuous partial attention" guru Linda Stone and Google.org's director Larry Brilliant -- with more to follow in the coming months.

Originally posted by (author unknown) from TED | TEDBlog, on November 18, 2007 6:00 AM

I am very sick. Please send Good Doggie thoughts to me. (Hospitals are so scary.)

Originally posted by Blue ~ writing at dogster.com from Blue's Sunny Life, on November 18, 2007 5:32 AM

I ate one whole cup of food today. And I didn't pee in the house! But Phoggie had to chop my pretty coat off because I was too sick to keep myself clean. (I think she used a lawnmower.) I look weird.

Originally posted by Blue ~ writing at dogster.com from Blue's Sunny Life, on November 18, 2007 5:32 AM

My stitches are itchy. But I have to lick at them when Phoggie isn't looking. When she caught me the other day she put me in a baby bodysuit. I was mortified.

Originally posted by Blue ~ writing at dogster.com from Blue's Sunny Life, on November 18, 2007 5:32 AM

Phoggie bought me my very own squeaky squirrel. It's huge. I almost rolled down the stairs trying to carry it up to my room.

Originally posted by Blue ~ writing at dogster.com from Blue's Sunny Life, on November 18, 2007 5:32 AM