Remember when you used to dance in cages on Lansdowne Street in 1991? Who could resist these white guys?! [Thanks, Marxy]

Originally posted by hustler of culture from hustler of culture, on October 4, 2008 7:43 PM

Just some thoughts in advance of tonight’s Brewers/Phillies game:

David Bush gets a closeup, and while Bush has, in the past, been a pitcher I pushed as a sleeper candidate, an underrated hurler, etc., I’m not sure this is the time to tout him as someone who might surrpise this evening. Since a strong 2006 season, Bush’s peripherals have been slipping, with his strikeout rate and home-run rate going in opposite directions, leaving him a back-end starter rather than a #3 with #2 upside. You can ski on his Stuff scores: from 21 to 14 to 6 in three years. He survived this year on a very low BABIP (.238), and his problems with lefty batters (.244/.308/.473) could give him trouble against the Phillies’ lineup core. In six career starts against the Phillies-here’s your grain of salt-Bush has allowed 10 homers. Carlos Villanueva might be warming up right now.

The Brewers bats haven’t been good, with four singles, three doubles and five walks in two games. That’s it. They’re not quite as HR-dependent as the White Sox are, but they do need to hit some long balls if they’re going to win. The matchup of Jamie Moyer-despite his history of being effective against right-handed batters-is as good as it will get for the Brewers in this series. They have to take advantage of the situation.

The Phillies are 2-0 in this series without getting a ton from Ryan Howard and Chase Utley. The two are 1-for-12 with six walks the “1″ being Utley’s double Wednesday off of Mike Cameron. In what could well be a high-scoring affair tonight, with two good offensive teams facing #3 starters in a hitters’ park, what the Phillies get from their two best hitters could be a key to whether we see a Game Four in this series.

I can’t help but wonder, should the Brewers not win three straight games here, if it will have been worth it for them. Was it worth Matt LaPorta, a couple of other prospects, and the cash they paid Sabathia to have the September they had, and a couple of postseason home games. The cash will cancel out, so it just comes down to the question of whether the six years of LaPorta at below-market cost was worth it. We say, all the time, that flags fly forever; trading the future to win a championship is just something you have to do sometimes. But what happens when what you trade for is just a naked flagpole?

I don’t know if there’s a right answer. I just think the question is interesting.

Originally posted by Joe Sheehan from Baseball Prospectus: Unfiltered, on October 4, 2008 2:10 PM

Sarah Palin attacked Obama's patriotism today over his association with former Weatherman Bill Ayers -- a move that makes it perfectly legitimate to raise questions about the Palins' associations with a group founded by an Alaska secessionist who once professed his "hatred for the American government" and cursed our "damn flag."

In Colorado today, Palin seized on the big front-page New York Times story about Ayers and Obama, which concludes that the two men "do not appear to have been close," to launch her most vicious attack yet on the Illinois Senator -- a harbinger of what's to come.

"This is not a man who sees America as you and I do -- as the greatest force for good in the world," Palin said. "This is someone who sees America as imperfect enough to pal around with terrorists who targeted their own country."

If Palin is going to say this, it is now perfectly legitimate to point out that she repeatedly courted a secessionist group founded by someone who openly professed hatred of the American government, cursed our flag, and wanted to secede from the Union. Sarah's husband, Todd Palin, was a member of this group, which continues to venerate that founder to this day, for years.

As you already know, the group is the Alaska Independence Party, which sees as its ultimate goal seceding from the union. Todd was a member, with a brief exception, from 1995 until 2002, according to the Division of Elections in Alaska.

And though Sarah Palin herself was apparently not a member of this group, there's no doubt that she repeatedly courted this secessionist organization over the years. In 1994, Palin attended the group's annual convention, according to witnesses who spoke to ABC News' Jake Tapper. The McCain campaign has confirmed she visited the group's 2000 convention, and she addressed its convention this year, as an incumbent governor whose oath of office includes upholding the Constitution of the United States.

The founder of the AIP was a man named Joe Vogler. Here's what he had to say in a 1991 interview, only a few years before Palin attended its convention: "The fires of hell are frozen glaciers compared to my hatred for the American government."

He also said this: "And I won't be buried under their damn flag. I'll be buried in Dawson. And when Alaska is an independent nation they can bring my bones home."

Vogler has also said: "I'm an Alaskan, not an American. I've got no use for America or her damned institutions."

McCain apologists will argue that Sarah Palin was not a member of this group. But Obama wasn't a member of any Ayers anti-American group, either. And again, Palin repeatedly courted the AIP, and her husband was a member for years.

The main takeaway from today's Times story is that Obama's ties to Ayers are, if anything, less substantial than commonly alleged. So if the Ayers association means Obama "palled around" with "terrorists," as Palin put it today, surely Palin can be said to have "palled around" with a secessionist party whose founder openly professed hatred of America.

If Palin is going to directly question Obama's patriotism over his association Ayers, surely all these facts are now fair game and freshly relevant.

Originally posted by Greg Sargent from TPM Election Central, on October 4, 2008 12:55 PM

Special Pop Montreal 2-for-1 deal:
1. Ever wondered what the inside of the mysterious Sport Montréal Benfica (SMB) looks like?
2. In the mood for a tasty pulled-pork sandwich?

Well, you're in luck, friends. There's more to Pop Montreal's Record Sale & Gear Swap than just records and gear. Our friends L. & S. are working the concession and they're offering overstuffed pulled-pork sandwiches ("traditional" or "maple-chipotle") with cole slaw (of course) for $6 a pop. And if pulled pork just ain't your trip, they've also got vegetarian wraps ($5) and vegan salad rolls with spicy peanut sauce ($3) on offer. Oh, yeah, and there's lots of groovy records, instrument repairs, cigar-box geetars, books and zines, etc.

Saturday and Sunday only, 11am - 7pm.

Pop Montreal Record Sale & Gear Swap, 100 Bernard W. (Mile End)

Be there.

aj

Originally posted by aj kinik from ...an endless banquet, on October 4, 2008 11:46 AM

October 4, 2008 - 12:27 p.m. - Venice, CA

I stumbled upon this sign heading to lunch on Abbot Kinney. I wish this casting had happened today. I followed the arrows and found myself behind Joe's Restaurant. Had the casting been in session, I would have tried to audition for something for sure. Todd Solondz has written and directed two of my all time favorite films, "Happiness" and "Welcome to the Dollhouse". I wish I could read aloud words written by Todd before I ever see them on screen. I bet that would be special!

Originally posted by hustler of culture from hustler of culture, on October 4, 2008 11:27 AM

Obama and ’60s Bomber: A Look Into Crossed Paths
Nytimes unfortunately reports:

More recently, conservative critics who accuse Mr. Obama of a stealth radical agenda have asserted that he has misleadingly minimized his relationship with Mr. Ayers, whom the candidate has dismissed as “a guy who lives in my neighborhood” and “somebody who worked on education issues in Chicago that I know.”

A review of records of the schools project and interviews with a dozen people who know both men, suggest that Mr. Obama, 47, has played down his contacts with Mr. Ayers, 63. But the two men do not appear to have been close.

Associated Press
Mr. Ayers was wanted by the F.B.I. in 1970. Charges against him were dropped in 1974 because of prosecutorial misconduct.

Originally posted by Other Options from Eyebeam reBlog, on October 4, 2008 6:57 AM

One of the basic tenets of the Tao of McGriff... Be consistent. Example: Fred McGriff performed in post-season play the same way he did during the regular season: consistently well. Or, I consistently get my hopes up, only for it to result in heartbreak.

Staying up late to watch the Red Sox crush the will of the Anaheim of Los Angeles of Interstate 5 of California Angels has given me ample time to contemplate Vlad Guerrero and the importance of post-season performance in the eyes of Hall of Fame voters.

For all that has been said about Guerrero's post-season drought, I am completely convinced that, when he is first eligible for the Hall of Fame, he will be elected with one of the highest vote percentages in recent memory. I'm thinking in the neighborhood of 92-94% on the first ballot.

I'm not entirely convinced that post-season exploits should weigh that much in the mind of the voter. Sure, it will help McGriff's case that his career postseason batting average is over .300 and he's socked 10 post-season home runs. Post-season success will also help someone like Curt Schilling. His performance with the Diamondbacks in 2001 and with the Red Sox in 2004 and 2007 will bolster his resume in the eyes of the HOF voters.

But really if there's anything that should push Schilling into the Hall, it's his character; his playing through pain in clutch situations. I, for one, don't think I could walk around with a tendon stapled to my ankle, let alone pitch. (Well, I guess I could if I was allowed to bring a folding chair to the mound and pitch to Little Leaguers. And I was high on morphine.)

Originally posted by Ben Henry from The Baseball Card Blog, on October 4, 2008 6:34 AM

Originally posted by dayf from Cardboard Junkie, on October 4, 2008 3:30 AM

I have a habit, probably of interest to no one but myself, of watching old movies and TV shows and then looking up the not-so-famous costars and bit players on imdb. I've been amazed at the coincidences and strange or sad biographies that I've come across doing this. 

One of my favorites was Anna Lee, a costar of Boris Karloff's in the Val Lewton film, Bedlam. I didn't know the first thing about her, but I found out a number of extraordinary things: 

- She played Lila Quartermaine on General Hospital for decades. I haven't watched GH since the mid-80s, but she was a legend. 

- She is the goddaughter of Arthur Conan Doyle. 

- Does anyone remember Russ Tamblyn, Laura Palmer's psychologist from Twin Peaks? He was once her son-in-law. 

- Alfred Hitchcock gave her away at her second wedding. 

- She was briefly related to Axl Rose when he and her granddaughter, Erin Everly, were married. 

Tonight I was watching a 1974 episode of Columbo (that's probably a sad way to spend a Friday night to most people, but I love it) called "An Exercise in Fatality", and I came across a few interesting tidbits about actors I didn't recognize at all (well, other than the guy who played Dwayne on One Day at a Time - I knew him right away). None of these are as interesting as Anna Lee's bio, but I'm still amazed at the connections that come off one old TV show. 

- An actress named Collin Wilcox, who played a boozy, troubled wife of the murder victim, was the same actress who falsely accused a black man of raping her in To Kill a Mockingbird. 

- The murder victim was played by an actor named Philip Bruns... who eventually went on to become the first Morty Seinfeld, Jerry's dad, before the actor most of us associate with the role took it over. 

- An actress named Gretchen Corbett, whom you'd probably recognize from her many bit parts from the 60s-90s (she had a long-time stint on The Rockford Files, but I never watched that), is now active in Portland theater and directs a theater company for underprivileged children. 

Geeky, I know, but I love reading stuff like this.

Originally posted by Valarie Smith from Crazed Teacups, on October 3, 2008 10:54 PM

I finally rolled MT-Dispatch 2.00. I’ve been using it for a while on my two sites, but haven’t released it until now. This version includes several new features including a new directory layout, better responsiveness, auto recycling, and synchronization to MTOS 4.21.

Documentation

Download

Originally posted by Reed A. Cartwright from De Rerum Natura, on October 3, 2008 10:52 PM

A lovely video, for a lovely song, from a lovely album: Britta Persson's Kill Hollywood Me, available only on import, is one of my favorite albums this year.

And this is the very charming video for the title track:

Originally posted by Benjamin Trott from Stupidfool.org, on October 3, 2008 9:50 PM

Republican state legislators, at the behest of the McCain campaign, have now filed an emergency appeal with the Alaska Supreme Court trying to shutdown the 'Troopergate' investigation. The plaintiffs (echoing the Bush v. Gore decision) claim "the plaintiffs and Alaskans will suffer irreparable harm" if the Branchflower report is released, as scheduled, next Friday, October 10th.

Bear in mind, the people in charge of the investigation moved the release date up so as not to have it released on the eve of the election. That was the original schedule long before Palin was chosen as veep nominee. And the GOP lawyers the McCain campaign sent to Alaska have succeeded in having almost all the parties connected to Palin refuse to cooperate with the investigation. So it's not completely clear just what Branchflower is going to be able to come up with, either inculpating or exculpating.

But this is an opportunity to refocus our attention on something that has been lost in the nonstop coverage of Palin's campaign trail lies and botched interviews: her record in Alaska strongly suggests she lacks the character to be trusted with high office. Though the troopergate scandal is tied narrowly to Palin's firing of Alaska's top cop, Walt Monegan, the heart of the story is about a private vendetta that Palin tried to settle using her new powers as the chief executive of the state of Alaska. Thwarted in doing so, all evidence suggests she fired the public official who refused to execute her plan.

Nor is it the only example. Both as mayor and governor, Palin has shown the tell-tale signs of a politician who hires cronies and fires or blackballs critics. This part of Palin's record gets deep in the weeds. So it's not as flashy as the boffo interviews or and irresistible as the straight-up lies she's been caught in. But we need no closer example than the Bush administration to know that people like this are dangerous and corrosive to our public institutions.

Originally posted by Josh Marshall from Talking Points Memo, on October 3, 2008 8:34 PM

Python script and document template from The Omni Group for using OmniOutliner as an authoring tool for Apple Help Book content. This is the tool Omni uses to generate their own help books.

 ★ 

Originally posted by John Gruber from Daring Fireball, on October 3, 2008 7:25 PM

Devel::NYTProf 2.04 is out. Tim has blogged about the "big"* improvement - it now takes about 10 times as long to fill your disk. Yes, profiles are now compressed as they are written. For significant sized programs this is a big win:NYTProf 2.03 was producing profile data at the rate of about 13MB per million statements executed. That might not sound too bad until you realise that on modern systems with cpu intensive code, perl can execute millions of statements every few seconds. * or small

Read more of this story at use Perl.

Originally posted by nicholas (posted by brian_d_foy) from use Perl, on October 3, 2008 7:22 PM

   

Photos from sealow08, darlene*, and +Maco+.
View more photos in the Multiple Exposure group pool.

      

Originally posted by Heather Champ from Flickr Blog, on October 3, 2008 7:04 PM

How to build a simple iPhone application.

 ★ 

Originally posted by John Gruber from Daring Fireball, on October 3, 2008 6:32 PM

Stewart posted a photo:

I forget where in BC it's from, but it looks Haida.

Originally posted by Stewart from Sylloge, on October 3, 2008 6:17 PM

So I can't believe I haven't blogged about this before, because every time I'm out with a group of friends for lunch or dinner I'm reminded of this idea...and then proceed to bore my dining companions with it. But here it is.

Problem: Deciding how much everyone owes for a group meal -- especially when there's a gratuity calculation is involved -- is hard. Well, not "eliminating our dependence on foreign oil with nucular energy" hard, but you know, hard in the way that "math" is hard....especially when said mathemeticians have had a few.

Solution: Restaurant checks should do the math for you, in a simple

Imagine a restaurant check that looked like this:

Subtotal:         $210.00

Tip:          ___________

Total:        ___________

A 20% tip would be $42, for a total
of $252.  I counted 4 people in your
party, which would come to $63 per 
person.

Thanks!

Look, simple math! Isn't this what the future's supposed to be, fancy calculating machines doing the hard work for us? (And I'm not talking about that tip calculator iPhone app you paid $0.99 for.)

Two more things to note...

• There's no need to get too clever, and attempt to provide an exact accounting per diner based on what they order. This is already clever enough.
• There's potential upside for restaurants and their staff. Take the example above, where the tab with a 20% tip comes to $63 per person. Which means that some will inevitably just round that up to the bills they have on hand. If all four diners here leave $65 instead of $63, that's an extra $8 in gratuity, raising the tip from 20% to almost 24%).

OK then, got that idea out of my head. Now when I'm out with folks I can annoy them not only with the story, but also with the tagline "And oh! I blogged about this...didn't you read that post?"

Originally posted by Michael Sippey from this is sippey.typepad.com, on October 3, 2008 3:51 PM

At Six Apart, we take our presence on Twitter (follow us at @sixapart) seriously, and we have a goal of being one of the best corporate users of the popular service. That might seem a little odd, since most of us see Twitter as a fun little lightweight service that we use mostly for personal messages, so it bears some explanation. 

Part of it is just our heritage. We know the folks that make Twitter and we like them and think they share a lot in common with our attitude and community at Six Apart. But more importantly, we have a long tradition of directly interacting with our community wherever the conversations are taking place, whether that's on blogs or anywhere else on the web. And seeing so many of our customers, partners and bloggers on Twitter meant we had to be there too, in a way that was useful, sincere, and (hopefully!) fun. We wanted to make @sixapart worth following even if you aren't yet a customer or partner of Six Apart, but if you were someone who's just interested in blogging or how the web is evolving. We frankly wanted to make it good enough that you'd encourage your friends to follow the account, too.

The great news is, our community noticed the work we've put into being the best business on Twitter, and it comes as no surprise that they've blogged about it. Here's some great recent examples:

• From Slate's (Movable Type-powered!) BizBox Blog: "Props to TypePad. Note how the customer--that would be one of us--was able to get superior service without even having to seek it out. New Web 2.0 technologies and products allow such things, but only if you take full advantage of them."
• And Ogilvy's 360º Digital Influence Blog has a post in their "Why Twitter Should Matter To You" series entitled Twustomer Service Edition: "Six Apart is doing a great job listening, engaging, and acting - and their doing it in a way that produces happy, vocal customers."

We could tease a little bit about the phrase "Twustomer Service" evoking Elmer Fudd's voice, though there's nothing wrong with having some fun while pointing out rock-solid fundamentals of doing good business. Ginevra Whalen, a long-time Six Aparter who was behind both of the Twitter conversations highlighted in these posts, also gets interviewed for the Ogilvy post. But the ideal of connecting to anyone who wants to get the most out of blogging and the web is something backed up by all of us here at Six Apart, from our community team to our professional support folks to our services team, who all work directly with bloggers every day.

Best of all, it seems like our community agrees. Just take a look at some our favorite tweets on the @sixapart account — they cover everything we love about our community: 

• If we announce a new product, our community can let us know immediately what they think, as @kimonostereo did with a recent launch: "Virtual Movable Type is simply awesome."
• Our customers can let us know when they're getting the most out of our tools, as @marcjohns did recently: "Overhauling my website using Typepad. The more I use it, the more I totally dig it. Getting rid of my ol clunker of a table-infested site."
• When we go to events, we can get instant feedback, as @dbrazeal offered to our CEO Chris Alden at the recent BlogWorld conference: "Chris Alden (Six Apart): Today's mainstream social networks are like yesterday's mainstream media. Will be fragmented #bwe08"
• And we can see how our customers inspire each other and us with their praise and encouragement, like CitizenDino: "The Six Apart people are simply inspiring. And having read about them in the Sarah Lacy book made it cooler.

There are lots more ways for this conversation to evolve, and we do know that a lot of times Twitter is just used to vent or get complaints off your chest. So we're ready to respond to that as well — we don't expect everything you say to us to be perfect, and we do expect it to be passionate.

Honestly, the tools for tracking and responding to these conversations are still relatively new, so they're not perfect at helping us catching every mention and responding as quickly as we'd like. (Customers should still always file help tickets to get support directly from us!) But despite the challenges, we want to try to get this right because we think making it easier to have a direct connection to Six Apart means its that much more likely to be listening and responding to what you need. All you have to do is follow @sixapart and we'll be following your conversations, too.

Originally posted by Anil Dash from Six Apart News & Events, on October 3, 2008 1:51 PM

Originally posted by (author unknown) from the real janelle, on October 3, 2008 1:51 PM

With the dust finally settling after the debate, it is becoming more and more clear that Sarah scored a resounding victory last night. The conservative media is ecstatic, and most of the mainstream media are declaring it a draw but noting that Sarah did exactly what she needed to do. The leftists and Obambaphiles aren't impressed, but we weren't expecting them to see the light anyway. Even if we accept the idea that Sarah and Sen. Biden tied (and I will admit that the he did well), I would give the tie to Sarah for several reasons:

1) Low expectations.
2) The debate was billed as a referendum on Sarah, and hardly anyone mentioned Joe Biden in the run-up. Far more people tuned in to watch her than her opponent, so she probably got more attention from the audience.

I would also note that skeptics such as David Brooks and Peggy Noonan wasted no time in jumping back on the bandwagon (though we are still awaiting reaction from Kathleen Parker).

So, Sarah is not only back in the game but back with a vengeance. To quote Noonan, "she killed." The only question now is how much movement we will see in the polls. My guess is that McCain will get enough of a bump to take back narrow leads in Virgina, Florida, and possibly Ohio. That would leave him down slightly overall, but well within striking distance if he can score victories in his own debates (which, judging by his first performance, he can).

Lastly, I think we saw last night that the unedited Sarah is far better than the unethical, cut-and-spliced travesties that Charlie Gibson and Katie Couric presented (and no, I don't think that's putting it to harshly after reading the unedited transcripts). This should provide a lesson to the McCain campaign that LIVE interviews are a absolute necessity for Sarah. I don't have a particular affinity for the Sunday talk shows, but I'm starting to think that they are the best venue simply because they cannot be edited. I know that Brian Williams of NBC has the next private interview lined up, and while I think he may have to be more careful after watching the debate, the campaign should assume that he will be just as...ahem..."artistic" in his editing as the other two network anchors. So, now is the time to start booking "Meet the Press" if they want to avoid another hit job.

Congratulations to Gov. Palin on a great debate, and thanks to all of you for helping her get there!

Originally posted by Adam Brickley, aka "ElephantMan" from Draft Sarah Palin For Vice President, on October 3, 2008 1:50 PM

Dear Brittney Gilbert,

We know you have our contact information, because you've used it to ask us for interviews (which seem to have been canceled altogether, it seems.) And that's fine. But when we see a post on the CBS5 blog speculating on the health of our organization, we have to wonder why you didn't do the responsible thing and, um, ask us?

We know that you're "just a blogger" and yes, there was a time when bloggers weren't expected to do any reporting, just provide speculation. And, sure, we still do it every now and then, but we try not to do so when we have access to the people we're writing about.

If you're honestly concerned about the fate of "bloggers employed by big media," bloggers like YOU, here's one hint that might help you retain your job: open your email and contact us. (Our deep self-absorption means we're totally open to blathering on and on about ourselves! You can even contact us here! It's just that easy!) Because the Bay Area market just got the gift of a couple of excellent unemployed bloggers who have the chops to do just that, and if you're not careful, your bosses might be wondering if those guys are available.

Much love,
SFist

Originally posted by Brock Keeling from SFist, on October 3, 2008 1:01 PM

The long-running saga of a building on Bergen Street in Prospect Heights owned by some successful artists who've been working hard to clear the building of its rent-stabilized tenants is winding down. There has been controversy and protests, but the building is now down to a handful of people and eviction proceedings are underway. The entire sordid tale, sure to incite strong reaction depending on which side of the landlord-tenant divide one's sympathies fall, is detailed at length in this week's Village Voice. The "hipster landlords" plan to remodel the eight-unit building at 533 Bergen Street into a 20-room private residence. They've already forced out four rent-stabilized tenants under a law allowing eviction if the owners are moving in. Three market rate tenants are still there and there's now an eviction proceeding against a rent-stabilized tenant paying $402 a month. Her apartment will become a storage room for bikes and strollers. Oh, and a playroom for the landlord's little ones. Call it Economakis: Brooklyn Edition.
· A Hip Young Couple Clears Out Low-Rent Tenants [VV]
· Artists Evicting Tenants in Prospect Heights [GL]

Originally posted by Robert from Curbed, on October 3, 2008 12:26 PM

From the "you can't make this up" file, a McCain foreign policy adviser claimed today that the candidate's decades-long interest in Latin America is exemplified by the fact that he had a girlfriend in Brazil 50 years ago while he was in the Navy:

Speaking at an Americas Conference panel discussion Friday on the next U.S. president's Latin American policy, McCain advisor Richard Fontaine started out by mentioning an old Brazilian flame of McCain's, who recently emerged in the press.

''Talking a little about his personal experience, he was famously born in Panama and has traveled all over the hemisphere for many years.'' Fontaine said. ``In fact, I saw, I guess it was last week, that his old girlfriend in Brazil has been found from his early days when he was in the Navy and was interviewed. She's a somewhat older woman now than she was then, but it sorta speaks to the long experience he has had in the region -- in the most positive terms.''

Fontaine was referring to former model Maria Gracinda Teixeira de Jesus, who recently gave an interview to O Globo saying the former sailor was quite the kisser. According to McCain's memoirs, `Faith of My Fathers,` they met in 1957, when his ship, the USS Hunt docked in Brazil.

''I called him John but also my darling and my sweet coconut,'' she said. ``He was a great kisser. I liked it so much that I bought a book to learn how to kiss myself.''

She goes on to say that if McCain wins the election, she'll send him a telegram.

Originally posted by David Kurtz from Talking Points Memo, on October 3, 2008 12:24 PM

A researcher contends that two bad iPhone UI decisions could lead to phishing and spamming exploits. After months of inaction and three software updates from Apple with no patches to be seen, he has decided to publish how the exploits work in hopes of forcing action.

Read More...

Originally posted by david@arstechnica.com (David Chartier) from Infinite Loop, on October 3, 2008 10:54 AM

From Slice

Clicking in to the Slice inbox today, we've got an awesome, awesome review of Flatbread Company pizza up in Portland, Maine. Thanks to homeslice Dustin for dropping this cheesebomb on us!

Avid fan of Slice here who first off wants to thank you for your daily distracting posts, which most certainly help the work day go by far more easier. The concept of "food porn" always seemed weird to me, but there's no doubt that my addiction to your site (which obviously stems from my addiction to pizza), has enlightened me to understand said concept. And it's come to the point that whenever I eat a really good pizza, the immediate thought process is that I must alert you and all the fellow Slicers out there. And finally, I have found a place that deserves such accolades. So without further ado, let me speak of a wonderfully wonderful place in Portland, Maine, called Flatbread Company.

Flatbread Company

Location visited: 72 Commercial Street, Portland ME 04101; map); 207-772-8777; flatbreadcompany.com
Pizza style: Artisanal, rustic, sustainorganic pies
Oven type: Wood-burning clay oven

Now, as any food patron will tell you, almost as important as the quality of the food itself is the quality of the preparation, environment, and service. Meaning, if one were to go to a restaurant that is known for great food, if the waiter or waitress is a jerk or if you see bugs all over the place, there's no way you're going to enjoy the meal as much as you would if the environment was friendly and clean.

There's no doubt that psychology pays a huge factor with enjoying anything, and eating pizza is no different. And let me say that Flatbread Company is an excellently run establishment that promotes all locally grown, organic ingredients, combined with a positive and friendly vibe (one might even say a hippie sort of vibe, meant in the whole peace and love sort of way). And these days who isn't a fan of a.) organic b.) locally grown c.) peace and love? Right? ;) Not to mention that the restaurant is located directly on the Portland waterfront, which is quite beautiful.

Moving on, when the lady and I sat down, the immediate attention-getter was the awesome wood-fired clay oven that can be seen by all. I mean, what pizza lover can't get excited by that? (no Slice reader I imagine, haha). And not only is that oven in view, but they actually have a dude literally chopping the wood right next to it! I mean, they really don't leave much to the imagination here, and that is perfectly fine by me.

So feeling hippie-ish and all, we decided to go with a nonmeat pie and ordered the Community Flatbread, which is topped with caramelized onions and mushrooms as well as various herbs—definitely a nice touch. And when the pie came to the table, our eyes were as wide as can be. I mean, taking a look at the pictures, I imagine a lot of people are now feeling the same way.

Before we consumed, however, I ordered my lady to hand me over the camera in her bag and announced to her that I had to get this pie in the hands of Slice. Photographically speaking, of course (please note that this is one of the very few and rare occasions in which I have ordered my lady to do anything. I feel justified that it was the right call, though, as I felt it my duty to spread the word to our fellow Slicers).

Anyway, the preparation, the fact that things were organic and local, the setting, etc., etc., were all great, but the fact remains, how does the actual pizza taste? And, Adam, the pizza tasted wonderful (I really want to use the wonderfully wonderful line again, but it's kind of lame to use it twice [Yes, wonderfully lame! ;) Just kiddin'. —The Mgmt.]. The sauce, the dough, the toppings—everything—just tasted great. I'm not quite polished in pizza acumen, as you can tell, so I am going to come up short with explaining the minor details that I know you find important to what makes a good pie a great pie, but since I read your site so often, I can say that the "balance" was perfect.

The two of us have never eaten an entire large pie before, but there was no problem in making this one go entirely bye-bye. I just noticed on their website that they have a few more locations, and next time I travel to New England, I might have to make a minor detour to hit up a different Flatbread. And I certainly suggest that you do the same, my dear friend.

So enjoy your weekend, Adam, and feel free to present any of this information or pictures how you seem fit. And thanks once again for your site—I effing love it!

Best,
Dustin

------------------------------------------------------------
Dear Dustin,
Thank you for the wonderfully wonderful review and photos. I can't tell you how happy I am to get some more intel on this place. It's funny, because longtime Slice reader Paulie Gee tipped me to Flatbread Company a couple weeks ago via email:

I saw you had a blog on American Flatbread, but I didn't find anything on Flatbread other than a comment from July. I had seen pictures of their ovens in New England as I was inviting shots into my Pizza Oven Flickr group. What I didn't realize is that I might be looking at more than one location. What really caught my interest though was when I recently spotted a very nice shot of one of their ovens and invited it to the group, assuming it was from the same place. Then I noticed that the picture was taken on Maui. It looks like a very interesting and promising chain. Especially with an expansion to Hawaii. However, maybe that's just where the owner wants to retire. Paia is a great town.

Funny how that all works out. And Paulie provided this link on Flatbread Company: http://www.inc.com/magazine/20070401/casestudy.html

Thanks again, Dustin. And thanks, too, Paulie, for putting Flatbread on my radar; I'm sure you're reading this.

Hasta la pizza,
Adam

Originally posted by Adam Kuban from Serious Eats, on October 3, 2008 10:15 AM

I know I've posted this one before but I'm probably gonna post it each time I run across it.

That's chef Kin Jing Mark stretching and dividing dough into super-thin noodles. Seeing this when I was a kid made a great impression on me about the wonder of mathematics.

(link)

Originally posted by jason@kottke.org from kottke.org, on October 3, 2008 8:48 AM

We have been very quiet lately. Last post on the blog was 2 1/2 weeks ago. Not what you would expect from folks who are supposed to be on the cutting edge of development.  But there are good reasons.

In the past month two new members have joined our team, Michael Lascarides and Trevor Thornton. Both come out of the for-profit world and each brings an entirely fresh perspective to our work. Michael was hired as a User Analyst (HR speak) but in his own words his job is to become an advocate for the user in all our various activities - development, strategy, deployment. Trevor is officially a UI designer but has found his niche at Labs as an IA.

On the face of it, this is not earth shattering but it has shifted our perspective to focus on some fundamentals that are often deprecated because of deadlines or lack of funding or lack of time or, you name it.

Usually there is time for things like documentation and process flow and work flow systems and team building when projects are not critical. In my experience (and I have to admit it is very limited) the best run operations that I have encountered are not big producers because the resources have been used to create the perfect system with very little left over to actually populate it or create product.  NYPL of course is know for producing in chaos.  And that has worked for quite awhile. But we have now taken on the biggest project we have ever owned - the reinvention of Nypl.org from a flat HTML (multi-thousand page site) to  a template driven CMS  (Drupal) site.

If that weren’t daunting enough we are meticulously going through the process of evaluating all the legacy content and reorganizing it into  a more organic comprehensive taxonomy. Without doing this work, the CMS project would be for naught. (more…)

Originally posted by Barbara Taranto from NYPL Labs, on October 3, 2008 8:33 AM

It was more joint press conference than debate, but if you were, say, watching the baseball playoffs and missed it, we bring you an abbreviated version of the veep debate, in all its glory, you betcha:

Originally posted by David Kurtz from Talking Points Memo, on October 3, 2008 8:18 AM

According to Andrew Marchand, in a report for ESPN 1050, Bobby Valentine would be interested in managing the Mets again.

In the report, Marchand quotes Valentine as saying:

‘I am working for a team that needs me and wants me as their man.  I love it here, but I am an American and love great challenges.  I was a in a Met uniform in the ’70s, ’80s, ’90s, 2000, and would love to be there in the next decade.’

As noted earlier, the New York Post and Newsday have both reported that the Mets have offered Jerry Manuel a two-year contract, ‘’but he has yet to sign it.’

The thing is, according to Marchand, ‘Manuel may want a three-year commitment.’

By the way, to listen live to ESPN 1050, and to check out the Marchand Report, which airs every day at 10:40 am, click here.

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Originally posted by Matthew Cerrone from MetsBlog.com, on October 3, 2008 7:18 AM

Question: What do stray cats and Met partial season ticket holders have in common?

Answer: There are presently no plans to relocate either party to Citi Field.

Back in July, 2007, I wrote a post about a possible plan to move Shea Stadium's stray cats to Citi Field (See "Fat Cats Sitting Pretty in Citi Field").

Today's Newsday has an update on the situation

Will it be known as Kitty Field?

At least one cat lover wants the Mets to bring Shea Stadium's feral felines to their new home, Citi Field.

"They're part of Mets lore," said Bryan Kortis of Neighborhood Cats, a Manhattan rescue group. "So why not keep them around?"

Since the ballpark opened in 1964, strays have occasionally scampered across the field during games, including one legendary 1969 incident when a black cat pranced in front of the Chicago Cubs dugout. The Mets went on to beat the Cubs for the National League East division title and won the World Series.

A spokeswoman for the city Parks Department said Shea staff believes only one or two cats live at the ballpark. She said when cats are caught, they are taken to shelters.

Anthony Rizzo, the parks department coordinator at Shea, said yesterday he's never seen cats at the stadium.

Kortis estimated the stadium may be home to 20 to 40 cats, based on Shea's size and its proximity to Flushing Bay, which makes the Willets Point section of Queens a haven for rodents.

"When they take out a tarp and roll it and a cat pops up ... it'd be unlikely there'd only be one or two," Kortis said.

The Mets referred questions about the cats to the parks department, which said there is no plan to move the cats to Citi Field. Kortis said cats could be useful at the new ballpark.

"They need cats there because they're right near the water, and if they don't have them, they're going to be overrun with rats," he said.

Originally posted by Kingman from Loge 13, on October 3, 2008 5:25 AM

Before every getaway game, Manny makes a dugout announcement:

"Let us have a happy flight," he says, and that means we better win, because flights after a loss are no fun. He said it tonight just before the first inning and we're going to have a happy flight home after beating the Cubs again. I'm sure guys will be giddy, because we're going back to Cali with a chance to win this series.

We're an excited team right now, but the clubhouse is probably a little quieter than it was last night. We still have to take care of business. We haven't won anything yet. We've got a flight home and a long day tomorrow with a workout and the next game isn't until Saturday night.

You had to like the way we won tonight. Zambrano stuck it to us in the first inning and the crowd was going absolutely wild and we bounced back and turned the tables in the second inning and completely took the crowd out of the game. It got silent again, like it did last night when James hit the grand slam.

And another thing you had to like was that second inning, we did it without Manny. We can't expect him to do everything every game. The guys were picking each other up and making his job easier. That's just the way we've been playing for the past month and it's why we're in the position we're in.

 

 

Originally posted by Andre Ethier from Dining with 'Dre, on October 2, 2008 11:02 PM

This may not have gotten a lot of attention. But in the post-debate commentary, Chris Matthews had Howard Fineman and Roger Simon on. And Simon started in on some aggressive tire-swinging. And as this was happening, a member of the crowd raised this anti-tire-swinging sign. Here you see it behind Matthews. But it was raised in Simon's line of sight and he would be the logical target since he was the clear tire swinger on the panel ...

(ed.note: Special thanks to TPM Reader MC for catching this critical moment.)

Late Update: For a brief primer on tire-swinging, see this post.

So Late It's Morning Update: Here's the text version of Simon's tire-swinging.

Originally posted by Josh Marshall from Talking Points Memo, on October 2, 2008 9:19 PM

Designers often talk about the results of their work, and even about the design process, but what we don’t often talk about is the careful framing of a project that allowed us to do the great work in the first place. When working with organizations big or small, it pays to first reach clarity about WHAT to design before working on HOW to design it.

Last week I got the chance to talk through a solid example of design strategy work with Lulu Pachuau and Bob Medcalf of the New Zealand firm Provoke. In this podcast we talk about and show the tools and methods they used to help the research institute Industrial Research Limited create a cohesive web strategy for the future.

What’s got me especially excited about this work is that Lulu and Bob took several of the methods that we teach during the Design Strategy day at the UX Intensive workshop, and they adapted the methods to address the challenges they faced.

If you’re interested in building some skills to help you move upstream and frame great design work, check out Adaptive Path’s UX Intensive workshops coming to Copenhagen on October 13-16 and to Austin December 8-11.

• listen to the podcast »
• check out some of the work »

Originally posted by Brandon Schauer from Adaptive Path, on October 2, 2008 6:56 PM

Theocacao: “Animation is the most significant obstacle that Core Animation tackles, but it’s far from being the only benefit.”

Originally posted by Brent Simmons from ranchero.com, on October 2, 2008 1:38 PM

From Serious Eats

Photograph from karen2754 on Flickr

When Steve Kaplan of New York City fractured his tooth after biting on an unpopped popcorn kernel at an Upper West Side movie theater, he demanded that the theater pay his $1,250 dental bill. Civil Court Judge Matthew Cooper denied the claim, saying that unpopped kernels were unavoidable:

Until such time as the same bio-engineers who brought us seedless watermelon are able to develop a new strain of popping corn where every kernel is guaranteed to pop, we will just have to accept partially popped popcorn as part and parcel of the popcorn popping process.

To prevent potential tooth fractures, Cooper suggested eating the popcorn one by one or avoiding popcorn and just eating candy.

Originally posted by Robyn Lee from Serious Eats, on October 2, 2008 12:45 PM

Many times when I'm talking to somebody about how they're designing their app, I suggest they use Core Animation to implement the user interface. More times I can count, I've gotten a puzzled look followed by the now-familiar "but I'm not really animating anything" response...

Originally posted by scott from Theobroma Cacao, on October 2, 2008 12:28 PM

Evan Longoria already has 2 HR for the Rays today. Here are all the other players with 2 HR in their first post-season game (nobody as of this writing has ever had 3…):

                   StreakStart  Streak End Games    AB    R    H   2B  3B  HR  RBI  SO   BB   SB   CS   BA   OBP   SLG   OPS  Teams
+-----------------+-----------+-----------+-----+------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
 Todd Walker        2003-10-01  2003-10-01     1      5    2    4   0   0   2    3    0    0    0   0  .800  .800 2.000 2.800 BOS
 Troy Glaus         2002-10-01  2002-10-01     1      4    2    2   0   0   2    2    1    0    0   0  .500  .500 2.000 2.500 ANA
 Edgardo Alfonzo    1999-10-05  1999-10-05     1      5    2    2   0   0   2    5    1    0    0   0  .400  .400 1.600 2.000 NYM
 B.J. Surhoff       1996-10-01  1996-10-01     1      4    2    2   0   0   2    2    0    0    0   0  .500  .500 2.000 2.500 BAL
 Ken Griffey        1995-10-03  1995-10-03     1      5    3    3   0   0   2    3    0    0    0   0  .600  .600 1.800 2.400 SEA
 Chipper Jones      1995-10-03  1995-10-03     1      5    2    2   0   0   2    2    0    0    0   0  .400  .400 1.600 2.000 ATL
 Gary Gaetti        1987-10-07  1987-10-07     1      3    3    2   0   0   2    2    0    1    0   0  .667  .750 2.667 3.417 MIN
 Ted Kluszewski     1959-10-01  1959-10-01     1      4    2    3   0   0   2    5    0    0    0   0  .750  .750 2.250 3.000 CHW
                          

Originally posted by Andy from Stat of the Day, on October 2, 2008 12:04 PM

BOOM! You wanted more knobbular limbs and moist deer nosicle action—YOU GOT IT!

More of your Precious PocketDeer™, People! Ehn! (Shoving photo your direction)

Kimberleh P., tiny hooves of thanks.

More of this little guy and his intensive care from The Sun. Another PockDeer photo here.

Originally posted by Meg from Cute Overload, on October 2, 2008 11:04 AM

Now this is clever:

"I came across the ad that was for a prevailing wage job for $28.50 an hour," said Mike, who saw a Craigslist ad last week looking for workers for a road maintenance project in Monroe.

He said he inquired and was e-mailed back with instructions to meet near the Bank of America in Monroe at 11 a.m. Tuesday. He also was told to wear certain work clothing.

"Yellow vest, safety goggles, a respirator mask...and, if possible, a blue shirt," he said.

Mike showed up along with about a dozen other men dressed like him, but there was no contractor and no road work to be done. He thought they had been stood up until he heard about the bank robbery and the suspect who wore the same attire.

Originally posted by schneier from Schneier on Security, on October 2, 2008 10:18 AM

‘gorge’ 2006     

magdalena bors is a belgian-born artist who now lives and works in australia. the young photographer
depicts strange and surreal scenes in her work. one of her on going series shows a variety of
household scenes which have been transformed into landscapes. bors uses common objects to build
the elaborate landscapes, photographing them with a human partly visible in the background.

http://www.magdalenabors.com


‘cavern’ 2007


‘woodland scene’ 2006


‘castle on the hill’ 2007


‘mountain vista’ 2008

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Designboom - Weblog, on October 2, 2008 10:03 AM

Solid overview of the iPhone SDK by John Timmer.

 ★ 

Originally posted by John Gruber from Daring Fireball, on October 2, 2008 9:39 AM

After canceling an iPhone development book last week, the company has put the book back in production now that Apple has rescinded the NDA for released versions of the iPhone OS.

Read More...

Originally posted by chris.foresman@arstechnica.com (Chris Foresman) from Infinite Loop, on October 2, 2008 8:08 AM

Lately I've been helping myself fall asleep by reciting my personal All-time Red Sox 40-man roster. Here's what I've come up with:

Catcher
Carlton Fisk (1969-1980)
Jason Varitek (1997-2008)

First Base
Jimmie Foxx (1936-1942)
Mo Vaughn (1991-1998)

Second Base
Bobby Doerr (1937-1951)

Shortstop
Johnny Pesky (1942-1952)
Rico Petrocelli (1963-1976)
Nomar Garciaparra (1996-2004)
Joe Cronin (1936-1945)

Third Base
Wade Boggs (1982-1992)
Frank Malzone (1955-1965)

Outfield
Ted Williams (1939-1960)
Carl Yastzremski (1961-1983)
Tris Speaker (1907-1915)
Harry Hooper (1909-1920)
Jim Rice (1974-1989)
Dwight Evans (1972-1990)
Manny Ramirez (2000-2008)

Designated Hitter
David Ortiz (2003-2008)

Starting Pitchers
Babe Ruth (1914-1919)
Roger Clemens (1984-1996)
Pedro Martinez (1998-2004)
Cy Young (1903-1908)
Lefty Grove (1934-1941)
Luis Tiant (1971-1978)
Mel Parnell (1947-1956)
Smoky Joe Wood (1908-1915)
Tim Wakefield (1995-2008)
Bill Lee (1969-1978)
Dutch Leonard (1913-1918)

Relievers
Dick Radatz (1962-1966)
Bob Stanley (1977-1989)
Ellis Kinder (1946-1955)
Jonathan Papelbon (2005-2008)

Wild Card Choices
Trot Nixon (OF)
Jackie Jensen (OF)
Fred Lynn (OF)
Bruce Hurst (P)
Oil Can Boyd (P)
Joe Dobson (P)

Hard to Leave Off
Dustin Pedroia (maybe in a few years)
Reggie Smith
George Scott
Rooster Burleson
Wes Ferrell
Big Bill Dinneen
Ernie Shore
Jim Lonborg

Originally posted by Ben Henry from The Baseball Card Blog, on October 2, 2008 7:09 AM

There's an interesting little thread at Stack Overflow on Hidden features of Perl. Go on over and add your favorites.

Originally posted by Andy Lester from Perl Buzz, on October 2, 2008 7:04 AM

With Michael Bloomberg expected to announce today that he will seek a third term as mayor, current and would-be electeds are, understandably, in a tizzy.

While few two-term City Council incumbents seem to support term limits, several have their sights set on other offices, and many say they are leery of changing the rules to keep themselves and the mayor around for an additional four years. Others who are known to be running to succeed Bloomberg tend to be less conflicted. Said a spokesperson for Congressman Anthony Weiner: "It's illegal to run for a third term."

And what of livable streets advocates? The Wall Street Journal today cites unnamed enviros who see a third Bloomberg term as a means to continue work on PlaNYC, and the prospect of Janette Sadik-Khan resetting DOT countdown clocks come January 2010 is an enticing one for sure.

With no clear livable streets favorite among the 2009 mayoral contenders (Tony Avella, anyone?), would you support another term for the Bloomberg administration?

Photo: Brad Aaron

Originally posted by Brad Aaron from Streetsblog, on October 2, 2008 6:56 AM

In Newsday, Jim Baumbach takes a look at the variety of pending free-agents who may interest the Mets and Yankees, such as Mark Teixeira, Manny Ramirez, Francisco Rodriguez, Derek Lowe, Orlando Hudson, Brian Fuentes, Raul Ibanez, Casey Blake and Jon Garland, to name a few.

Baumbach has the following to say about Rodriguez:

“I’d be shocked if come December the Mets aren’t opening the doors to Citi Field for a news conference unveiling K-Rod as their new closer.  Just seems too much of a given.”

In his most recent report for SI.com, Jon Heyman wrote that the Mets will have to at least consider Rodriguez or Fuentes.

By the way, in Newsday, Ken Davidoff makes the argument in favor of signing Rodriguez, who will likely seek a four-or five-year deal worth around $15 million per season.

During a conference call with reporters today, Minaya said:  “One of the top areas we need to address is the bullpen and the closer.  There’s only a few guys in the game what we say can, ‘lock-out an inning,’ so we’ll have to look in the market place, or look internally, because for a championship team that is very important.”

…it’s kind of funny when you think about it…i mean, the bullpen is the one aspect of this team that every Mets fan will agree was a problem…it just so happens, following a season in which the bullpen blew 30 saves, and following a season in which Billy Wagner will be out for a year, it just so happens K-Rod will be a free agent…that dude could not have timed his free agency any better…wow…

…i don’t know if i agree that K-Rod should be signed to such a long-term deal, but, i’ll say this, by signing him, the Mets not only improve their team, but they instantly ease the stress of their fans by shoring up their biggest weakness…

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Originally posted by Matthew Cerrone from MetsBlog.com, on October 2, 2008 6:36 AM

Well, the big day has finally arrived. Tonight, in what will almost certainly be the most-watched VP debate in history, Sarah faces off against Sen. Joe Biden with all the marbles on the line. I don’t want to get too bogged down in analysis, but I do genuinely think that all signs are pointing to a Palin win. Consider the following:

1) While I think that much of the criticism of Gov. Palin’s creatively edited interviews with Katie Couric has been overblown, it has succeeded in lowering expectations. In some cases, I think they have been lowered so far that it is literally impossible for Sarah to perform worse than expected.

2) Gov. Palin is generally regarded as a good debater. Coupled with low expectations, even a typical performance from Sarah will be regarded as a major win.

3) Thanks to her book on Obama, Gwen Ifill will be under more scrutiny than any moderator in history. She will likely go overboard to ensure that she is seen as unbiased, meaning that the questions will likely be fair ones rather than “gotcha” pop quizzes a la Katie Couric.

4) Debates cannot be edited. Both the Gibson and Couric interviews were edited to eliminate Gov. Palin’s best answers, and sometimes to make it look as if she evaded questions that, in the REAL interview, she answered. In a debate, there is no way to censor a speaker, so if Sarah answers a question, the public will actually hear her.

Now, Joe Biden is a good debater and a formidable opponent. He’ll be tough to beat, but I think that the deck is currently stacked in Sarah’s favor. In their rush to destroy her, some in the media have created a situation where she can look “better than expected” simply by forming complete sentences and not behaving like a character from “Hee Haw.” Hence, if she does indeed look competent and prepared, she will get even more of a bounce than she otherwise would have. An otherwise "good” performance will be seen as “stellar”, and an otherwise “stellar” performance could rise to the rank of “legendary”.

No promises, but I am going to try to live-blog tonight’s festivities. Hopefully, we will be watching the launch of Sarahmania version 2.0. See you then.

Originally posted by Adam Brickley, aka "ElephantMan" from Draft Sarah Palin For Vice President, on October 2, 2008 6:05 AM

I guess I should have realized that Topps would counter Upper Deck’s Sarah Palin card with one of their own, but honestly the thought never crossed my mind.  Even though I had immersed myself in politics, I really was hoping that the companies would keep the campaign out of the hobby for the rest of the year. 

Too bad.  And Topps is actually countering with a double dip of Palin, one a “regular” issue of her as governor of Alaska, the other a not so secret super shortprint featuring Palin as prom queen beauty queen.  It’s the second one getting all the attention.

Initial thought?  Man, what a stupid card.  I actually had a longer post in mind, but I see tonight that Chris at Stale Gum has already written it.

That’s why he’s a blogging leader, I guess.

      

Originally posted by handcollated from Hand Collated, on October 2, 2008 12:41 AM

Users are crucial to open source projects. Without them we have no reason to release publicly, and without refreshing the ranks of developers with users who join the fold, our projects die. Users are our customers, and we can't afford to treat them poorly. When a user wants to go the extra mile to help us as developers, turning him or her away is a grave misstep.

Here's an example. Andrea discovers a problem in PHP's database handling, where calling a certain function incorrectly causes a segfault. The bug isn't a work-stopper for her, and the fix is simple: Call the function correctly. Still, it's a segfault, and she figures the PHP folks will want to know about it. It also doesn't help her confidence in the tool that calling a function incorrectly segfaults. Being a good open source citizen, she decides to report the bug.

She's already spent the time figuring out the problem, and she reduces the code to a single, repeatable example, that shows exactly how to make the code segfault. "This should help them track it down," she thinks. She's spent an hour on this detour in the middle of a project for work, but knows that open source relies on bug reports to get things fixed.

She dutifully checks bugs.php.net, and finds nothing that matches, so she goes to submit the bug. Unfortunately, the PHP site will only accept bugs against 5.2.6, instead of 5.2.5 that she is running. This leaves her with three choices:

• Upgrade to 5.2.6 on a test machine, and test out her problem. She knows not to upgrade a production box so cavalierly.
• Find someone using a similar install to see if that person will test it for her.
• Submit the bug against 5.2.6, effectively lying but not spending any more of her time.
• Throw up her hands and say "Screw it, I've got work to do."

That's what happened to me, "Andrea", the other day. I wrote about it in a frothier Perlbuzz article the other day. I wish that my frustrations with PHP hadn't overshadowed my point about community building, so I'm trying again here.

What about the users?

My frustration in PHP's approach, and they're certainly not the only community to do this, is that the emphasis is in optimizing the time of the PHP developer who has to deal with bugs. "Who wants to deal with bugs that have already been fixed?" goes the logic. I imagine someone setting up the PHP bug database saying "We need to put something up to make sure that we don't get annoyed by bugs that have already been fixed." I can understand that motivation. As someone who answers questions in #perl about WWW::Mechanize all day, I can certainly empathize with not wanting to deal with pointless comments.

And yet...

Nowhere do I see any discussion of how the user sees the interaction. I doubt anyone considered the reaction of the user who is told "Sorry, you're not able to submit your bug report that you worked to get together to send to us." Instead, debate about the original article is from the point of view of the beleaguered developer, having to deal with those darn users, contributing their bug fixes.

Yes, I understand that plenty of people submit bugs that aren't bugs, or that have already been fixed. Perl's bug reporting system is wide open, and I've closed my share of tickets in RT that weren't really bugs. But I'm OK with that.

How long does it take to close tickets that aren't right? Compare that cost to the cost of losing a valid bug report. Or worse, alienating a potential friend of your project.

In everything we do when working on projects, we need to remember there are real users, real people at the other end that are the core of what we do.

Originally posted by Andy Lester from Perl Buzz, on October 1, 2008 8:42 PM

HBO is developing a series set 25-40 years in the future when Americans are fleeing the country en masse and settling elsewhere in the world.

In his research for "Americatown," Winters had explored possible nightmare scenarios that could bring the U.S. to a collapse decades down the road, like the price of oil skyrocketing and natural disasters reaching catastrophic proportions. Then suddenly oil hovered near $150 a barrel this summer, floods hit the Midwest and the South and Wall Street crashed under the weight of the mortgage crisis.

(via bygone bureau)

(link)

Originally posted by jason@kottke.org from kottke.org, on October 1, 2008 8:33 PM

John McCain's got real problems. This is from David Nather's Beyond the Dome blog at CQ ...

Let the record reflect that Barack Obama made the approach to John McCain tonight.

As the two shared the Senate floor tonight for the first time since they won their party nominations, Obama stood chatting with Democrats on his side of the aisle, and McCain stood on the Republican side of the aisle.

So Obama crossed over into enemy territory.

He walked over to where McCain was chatting with Republican Sen. Mel Martinez of Florida and Independent Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut. And he stretched out his arm and offered his hand to McCain.

McCain shook it, but with a "go away" look that no one could miss. He tried his best not to even look at Obama.

Finally, with a tight smile, McCain managed a greeting: "Good to see you."

Obama got the message. He shook hands with Martinez and Lieberman -- both of whom greeted him more warmly -- and quickly beat a retreat back to the Democratic side.

Campaigns are filled with hyperbole. But this, the no-eye-contact business at the debate and even the over-the-top affect at the Des Moines Register editorial meeting together suggest that McCain feels a sense of palpable disgust with Obama or visceral antipathy for him that is so great he's incapable of overcoming it in public settings.

That's a troubling lack of emotional control. But it seems in line with the character trait many mention about McCain -- that he is unable to engage in any contest without demonizing his opponent in his own head. There are a lot of other possibilities this seems to point to -- none of them pretty.

Originally posted by Josh Marshall from Talking Points Memo, on October 1, 2008 7:02 PM

From his intro to the Alinea Cookbook.

People like to think the creative process is romantic. The artist drifts to sleep at night, to be awakened by the subliminal echoes of his or her next brilliant idea. The truth, for me at least, is that creativity is primarily the result of hard work and study. The light bulb goes off unexpectedly at times, a consequence of associating everything I see, smell, hear and touch to food. ... The smell of a woman's perfume leads me to construct a dish around the emotionally powerful aspect of scent. And the accidental shattering of a wineglass makes me wonder how I can make raspberry that fragile. But more often, the new dishes I come up with are the product of methodology rather than inspiration.

More on the cookbook itself soon.

Originally posted by Michael Sippey from this is sippey.typepad.com, on October 1, 2008 5:24 PM

On today's Blogtown, the Portland Mercury reports on Jefferson High School, which recently found 115 Great Depression-era artworks in their basement recently. There's some great art in there, including this "original 1939 editorial cartoon by Lute Pease, a Pulitzer-winning editorial cartoonist" that shows "Hitler scheming to get hold of nothing other than Iraq's oil." Interesting. It's worth checking out the collection here.

Originally posted by Valarie Smith from Crazed Teacups, on October 1, 2008 4:37 PM

In tonight's installment, things unbelievably get worse for Sarah Palin. Just watch:

I've never been much of a Katie Couric fan, but I have to give her her due on these Sarah Palin interviews. They don't outweigh all the fluff she's produced over the years, but when her obituary is written, her gentle mauling of Palin will be her signature hard news moment.

Originally posted by David Kurtz from Talking Points Memo, on October 1, 2008 3:42 PM

Here it is, the much-hyped moment where Sarah Palin was unable to name any Supreme Court case that she disagreed with, other than Roe v. Wade:

Palin employs the same dodge here as she did when Katie Couric asked her what newspapers she reads -- she retreated to vague terms about how there are all those Supreme Court decisions out there that people might disagree with, just as she mentioned all those newspapers out there she relies on.

There is a certain irony here. John McCain has long criticized Barack Obama for speaking in platitudes, and then he went and picked a running mate who apparently can only think in platitudes.

Originally posted by Eric Kleefeld from TPM Election Central, on October 1, 2008 3:40 PM

Posted by Pamela Fox, Maps API Team

Back in May, we released a feature in Google Maps that let users toggle on additional "layers" of information on top of the map, starting with Panoramio and Wikipedia options. Both of these layers display thousands of variably sized icons on top of the map, and open info windows with more information about the clicked icon. So the user might click a large "W" in New York to read a snippet from Wikipedia's article about the Empire State Building, or they might click on a thumbnail in Black Rock City to see a photo of a Burning Man Temple.

Now, for those of you who want to easily enable these layers on your map (or through a custom control), you can create a new Layer object with the specified layer ID, and then add that to the map as an overlay. Check out the sample code and demo below, and read through the docs for more info:

map.addOverlay(new GLayer("com.panoramio.all"));
map.addOverlay(new GLayer("org.wikipedia"));

Note: There are localized versions of the Wikipedia layers available in many languages. These will not be automatically served to users based on browser setting, so you should explicitly add those if your map is targeted at a local audience. See this spreadsheet for a full list of IDs.

For those of you developers wondering how these layers are able to display so many icons without slowing the browser down, here's some inside info for you. The layers are actually implemented as GTileLayerOverlays, where the tiles are just transparent PNGs with icons baked into them. The clickability of the layer is achieved by passing information about the clickable pixel bounds of each tile to the client, then doing a client-side check to figure out which bounds the cursor is inside on the map mousemove and click events, and changing the cursor or popping up the appropriate info window. If you're interested in implementing a similar solution for your own thousand-markered mashups, check out John Coryat's clickable tilelayer demo in the demo gallery, or the various presentations on creating custom maps.

Originally posted by Pamela Fox from Google Geo Developers Blog, on October 1, 2008 2:00 PM

I don't think Sarah Palin is qualified to be President or Vice President. But I can't deny that she's already the Queen of Youtube. Just to give you a point of reference, of the top seven videos we've ever posted on our TPMtv youtube channel, five are about Sarah Palin. Anyway, you've been watching this on-going Sarah Palin interview trainwreck. It's been so bad she's now only willing to go on the air with right-wing yakkers like Hugh Hewitt. But as we get ready for the big event tomorrow night, Palin's historic confrontation with Joe Biden in St. Louis, we thought we'd pull together all of Palin's greatest interview moments in one boffo Sarah-mania clip reel ...

Originally posted by Josh Marshall from Talking Points Memo, on October 1, 2008 12:30 PM

Roy Fielding: All of those points are rather small compared to my overall complaint that it isn’t appropriate to define a “REST” binding to a specific data model’s limitations. The whole point of REST is to avoid coupling between the client applications and whatever implementation might be behind the abstract interface provided by the server.

First, by way of disclosure, I had an opportunity to provide some input several months ago as this was being developed, and a number of changes were made based on my input.  I also chatted with Al Brown last night.

I also chose to be willfully oblivious to any hype.  I have no comment on any complaints that have been made along those lines.

What matters most to me is not how they derive or express this specification, but on whether the operational behavior is such that a pure HTTP client can fully participate up to the limits of the HTTP specification, and AtomPub clients can participate to the limits of the AtomPub specification.  By that I mean that extensions are fine, if they are truly optional, e.g., an AtomPub client which is otherwise unaware of CMIS would be able to traverse collections, and fetch, update, and delete resources.

Based on my discussion with Al last night, I’m cautiously optimistic that this will be the case.  I looked at specific instances of service documents and feeds before I came to this conclusion.  Furthermore, they were open and responsive to my feedback, and I believe that their invitations for others to participate to be sincere.

Roy’s point that HTTP headers that affect the representation returned without a VARY header will poison caches is valid, and represents a bug.  I’ll point out that adding such a VARY header could very well cause caches to be less effective.  But, again, I view that as a simple bug, one that the TC intends to address, and one that isn’t overly surprising or a cause for concern at this early stage of standardization. 

Certainly neither HTTP nor AtomPub standardize query, as such I do not see it as a problem if a new media type is introduced for this use case.  Perhaps there might be a better way, and if so, it should be pursued, but otherwise a new media type is a perfectly acceptable solution.

As I’ve done with numerous other Atom extensions, I plan to work with this team to add support for CMIS to the Feed Validator.

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Sam Ruby, on October 1, 2008 8:57 AM

The Bobster and Old Blue Eyes collaborated on this tribute to Shea Stadium. If you are still reeling from Sunday's loss to the Marlins and of Shea Stadium, this will not necessarily help your mood. But you must watch.

I want to also take a moment and thank everyone who has e-mailed and commented on the site this week. Y'all have been very generous both with your kindness regarding Loge13.com and, most importantly, about your feelings regarding the end of Shea's days. I definitely think it has helped soften the blow. If you sent me an e-mail, be patient. I'm trying to get back to everyone.

And now for our feature presentation:

Originally posted by Kingman from Loge 13, on October 1, 2008 8:53 AM

The tiny village of Ilakaka, Madagascar had barely 40 residents before 1998. Then, a large deposit of sapphires was discovered along a nearby riverbed, and caught the eye of some Thai businessmen in the gem trade. Word got out, and Ilakaka swelled to tens of thousands of residents - the center of a sapphire boom, today the source of nearly 50% of all the sapphires in the world. Illegal miners mixed with large-scale operations, all operating under little or no regulation, in a wild-west atmosphere of potential fortunes, lawlesness, violence and hardship. In the years since, the easily-mined sapphire fields have been picked clean, and the remaining miners often work in deep holes, climbing far underground. Mining is also a family effort - according to an official study, of the 21,000 children living in the region, 19,000 belong to working families. (25 photos total)

Miners work in unison on September 13, 2008 as they shovel sand and loose gravel at an open-pit sapphire mine where they work for a daily wage near the southwestern Madagascan town of Ilakaka. (ROBERTO SCHMIDT/AFP/Getty Images)

Originally posted by (author unknown) from The Big Picture, on October 1, 2008 8:31 AM

06/19/2008

Originally posted by (author unknown) from the real janelle, on October 1, 2008 8:09 AM

Uh oh. It looks like the ongoing horror movie series otherwise known as the Katie Couric-Sarah Palin interviews may be about to offer up yet another gristly installment.

The other day, Politico's Jonathan Martin quoted an anonymous Palin aide who was worried about still-undisclosed interview footage in which Palin noted Roe vs. Wade but was unable to reference or discuss any other major court cases.

"There was no verbal fumbling with this particular question as there was with some others, the aide said, but rather silence," Martin wrote.

That was an anonymous account. And CBS News has refused to publicly confirm it. But a few moments ago, CBS News released the text of a couple questions (but not the answers) that Palin has been asked on interview footage that's set to air tonight. And sure enough, one of them is...

Why do you think Roe v. Wade is a good or bad decision? What other Supreme Court decisions do you disagree with?

Dum. Da Dum, Dum. Viewers with weak stomachs, consider yourselves warned...

Originally posted by Greg Sargent from TPM Election Central, on October 1, 2008 7:25 AM

Strange Maps ran across a wristwatch-like contraption from the 1920s that holds little scrolls of paper used for navigation, an analog version of Hertz's NeverLost and other in-car GPS navigation systems.

This fantastic contraption, called the 'Routefinder', showed 1920s drivers in the UK the roads they were travelling down, gave them the mileage covered and told them to stop when they came at journey's end. The technology -- a curious cross between the space age and the stone age -- consisted of a little map scroll inside a watch, to be 'scrolled' (hence the word) as the driver moved along on the map. A multitude of scrolls could be fitted in the watch to suit the particular trip the driver fancied taking.

(link)

Originally posted by jason@kottke.org from kottke.org, on October 1, 2008 7:22 AM

Anne Hathaway put on her big girl panties last night, and took on David Letterman and all of his questions about her "crash-and-burn" (her words) relationship with shady business dude Raffaello Follieri.

Dave asked the Rachel Getting Married actress if she had seen any signs that maybe Raf wasn't the guy she had hoped, to which she replied, "I don't want to go into the specifics but I will say that you do have to give me credit because as far as relationships crashing and burning goes, c'mon, I did pretty great. I mean, scorched that earth."

"I'm an all or nothing sort of girl," she added.

"Go big or go home," Dave countered.

"Thank you," said Anne.

It's actually really cute and endearing. On both parts. Dave was a gentleman and Anne rolled with the punches. Bravo. 

Originally posted by Tracy Pepey from iVillage - Daily Blabber, on October 1, 2008 7:11 AM

Remember how we told you that Katie Grand would be leaving Pop to start her own magazine for Conde Nast, and even we were like, "How can this be?"

Well, Vogue UK's got the rest of the details:

It'll be released just twice a year starting this March, and according to Katie herself, "I feel the time is ready for a new magazine, a new arena for new ideas. This time we'll have a larger format, bigger budgets and broader horizons than ever before."

So poo poo to those who think a new magazine shouldn't enter the print market - we say, if it's interesting, with amazing photography, incredible access and ideas worth poring over - and paying up for - the readers (and advertisers) will come.

The only lingering question - what happens to Pop?

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Fashionista, on October 1, 2008 6:58 AM

Midtown: Le Parker Meridian is adding another venue to join Norma's and the Burger Joint. As Flo Fab notes today, the space, opening on the 8th, is named the Knave after its passageway location "that has a nave-like vaulted ceiling, soaring columns and arches" and traffics in sandwiches, wine, and coffee.

But, what's interesting, and increasingly common these days, is the way they're touting their joe:

They are serving the excellent Counter Culture roasted coffee, they claim their baristas "have been training for years and have been recruited from all over the country," they won't offer to-go cups or drip coffee, no oversized drinks, and get this "No Cappuccino’s served after noon – it’s a breakfast drink!" Okay, we like your gumption Knave, but even in Italy one can get a cappuccino in the afternoon (whether the native Italians will drink it or not). You can also get them at all the other snobbish coffee joints in the city. It's a little too much. On the bright side: free wifi. Oh, and of course, another de rigueur offering: they're serving absinthe.
· At the Parker Meridien, a Bar Built for the Comforts of Another Era [NYT]

Originally posted by Amanda from Eater, on October 1, 2008 5:56 AM

Although Snow Leopard was introduced during WWDC, things have been quiet for the past few months. Now, though, Apple is readying another round of beta releases that will be distributed to a very limited number of testers.

Read More...

Originally posted by justin.berka@gmail.com (Justin Berka) from Infinite Loop, on October 1, 2008 5:50 AM

Sarah Palin has an answer to her media critics who say she isn't fit to be next in line for the presidency: They hate me because I represent the average "Joe Six-Pack" American.

Palin called in yesterday for a brief interview on the Hugh Hewitt radio show, and had this eminently quotable exchange:

Hewitt: Governor, your candidacy has ignited extreme hostility, even some hatred on the left and in some parts of the media. Are you surprised? And what do you attribute this reaction to?

Palin: Oh, I think they're just not used to someone coming in from the outside saying you know what? It's time that normal Joe six-pack American is finally represented in the position of vice presidency, and I think that that's kind of taken some people off guard, and they're out of sorts, and they're ticked off about it.

Well, it's true that Palin has taken some members of the press off guard, but not for the reasons she suggests...

Late Update: There was also this interesting line about bias by the media and the left against her religion:

Palin: I think that there's a lot of mocking of my personal faith, and my personal faith is very, very simple. I don't belong to any church. I do have a strong belief in God, and I believe that I'm a heck of a lot better off putting my life in God's hands, and saying hey, you know, guide me... And you know, so bet it, though I do have respect for those who have differing views than I do on faith, on religion. I'm not going to mock them, and I would hope that they would kind of I guess give me the same courtesy through this of not mocking a person's faith, but maybe perhaps even trying to understand a little bit of it.

Have any prominent members of the mainstream media mocked Palin's faith? Does anyone know what she's talking about?

Originally posted by Eric Kleefeld from TPM Election Central, on October 1, 2008 5:22 AM

By Juliet Eilperin In an interview with CBS anchor Katie Couric Tuesday night, GOP vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin continued to question humans' contribution to global warming. Palin's repeated suggestion that humans may not be responsible for recent climate change ranks as one of her clearest policy differences with GOP presidential nominee John McCain, and contradicts the view of most scientists. While she emphasized her shared commitment to addressing global warming impacts in her interview...Please click on the title to continue reading this entry.

Originally posted by The Washington Post from The Trail, on October 1, 2008 5:18 AM

• Four More Years for Bloomberg? (NYT, News, Post)
• State Panel Will Look at Privatizing Assets, Including Bridges, to Boost Revenue (NYT)
• Ten Finalists Announced in NYC Bike Rack Competition (NY1, News, City Room, Post)
• Momentum Grows for Bikes in Buildings Bill (News)
• Can NJ Turnpike Tolls Fund the ARC Tunnel? (MTR)
• Feds Direct $30 Million to 15 Rail Projects (AP)
• Brooklyn Judges Relinquish Some of Their Parking Spots in Columbus Park (Bklyn Eagle)
  
• Driver Abandons Car on Metro-North Tracks, Blames His GPS (AP)
• News Slams Sheldon Silver's Wasteful Commute
• 'Stereo Bikes' Too Noisy for Some Queens Residents (Gothamist)
  

Originally posted by Ben Fried from Streetsblog, on October 1, 2008 5:00 AM

Making the most of her time in New York City, a happy-looking Britney Spears got all dressed up for the theater and took in a showing of Broadway's In the Heights.

I haven't seen it yet, but I heard that it's just about the best new musical out there.

Hey, Brit, if you're reading this, tell us what you thought.

Originally posted by Tracy Pepey from iVillage - Daily Blabber, on October 1, 2008 3:37 AM

Leaving no stone unturned, the Times covers the effect that the Sarah Palin interviews are having on Katie Couric's ratings. Short story, not much effect at all.

But the week was still considered, by executives from both CBS and its rivals, to be among the best Ms. Couric has experienced since she joined the newscast two years ago. Jon Klein, the president of CNN’s domestic operations, said, "It was brand-building for a woman who is still one of the very best journalists out there."

N.B.: that brand building primarily took place on YouTube, where each of those clips is racking up hundreds of thousands, if not millions of views...

Originally posted by Michael Sippey from this is sippey.typepad.com, on October 1, 2008 12:04 AM

• Get More Out of Google Analytics
  Nice post by Ted Rheingold summarizing some of GA's advanced features.

Originally posted by (author unknown) from onfocus.com, on September 30, 2008 10:30 PM

Want to make a difference in the life of a public school teacher and his or her students? Want to contribute to the education of the next generation of bloggers? Well, now you can.

For the second year in a row, Six Apart is taking part in the Donors Choose Blogger Challenge. The challenge starts today, and we’d like to extend an invitation to you, as a member of the Six Apart community, to participate.

The Blogger Challenge is a friendly contest among bloggers to raise money for low-income public schools. Here’s how it works: teachers from all over the country post items they would like funding for, such as writing supplies for a journalism class, equipment for a science lab, or music instruments for a band class, and bloggers feature their favorite projects on a giving page, where their readers can go to donate. The bloggers who raise the most money or reach the most kids will win an award.

Just as we did last year, Six Apart is sponsoring the award for the bloggers who reach the most kids. We’d like to encourage all of you, our customers and your readers, to participate in the effort. Why? First, it just feels good - it’s very heartwarming and gratifying to receive the lovely thank you notes from kids in the classrooms you support. Second, it’s a very worthy cause. These future leaders of America and their teachers need our support as they learn to read, write, calculate, reason, appreciate the wonders of art and science, and become creative contributors to society. Besides, the world needs more intelligent, thoughtful bloggers like you!

Congratulations to the many Six Apart community members who raised a lot of money last year, including NYC-based venture capitalist Fred Wilson of A VC, who raised $18,000, and University of Minnesota biologist PZ Myers at science blog Pharyngula , who raised $15,000. Six Apart’s co-founder Mena Trott and VP of Evangelism Anil Dash both had their own challenges last year, and have posted their giving lists this year as well. Many more Six Apart-related bloggers are participating this year, including Finslippy, Silicon Valley Moms, Craig Newmark of Craigslist, Craig Newmark the economist, and Scienceblogs.com, to name a few.

Here’s how you can participate:

* Go to the Blogger Challenge page on Donors Choose and find a blogger’s giving list you’d like to support. (You’ll see Mena’s list, named after her blogs Nested and Dollar Short, in the General Blogs category.)
* Or, set up your own challenge and let your readers know where to go to support the projects you’ve chosen to feature.
* Sign up to donate to the projects you want to support.
* Feel good about helping kids and teachers in low-income schools
* TypePad bloggers: Note that you can add a Donors Choose widget to your blog that colorfully illustrates to your readers how your challenge is faring.

Watch for an occasional update from us as the Challenge progresses. Donors Choose will announce the results in early November, and we’ll reveal the winners of the Six Apart award for bloggers who reached the most kids.

Thanks for joining in the fun, and for showing the world that bloggers can make a significant difference in the lives of teachers and kids.

Originally posted by Ginger Tulley from Six Apart News & Events, on September 30, 2008 9:41 PM

Now playing: archived video of The Wire creator David Simon's talk at UC Berkeley's Townsend Center for the Humanities, titled "The Audacity of Despair."

Originally posted by Michael Sippey from this is sippey.typepad.com, on September 30, 2008 9:20 PM

We went, it rained, we tabled, people went home with bad-ass radical art (good job Microcosm). Was hosted by Gaia and had my first experience with the BPD at a college party (which makes one really feel their age-30!) Eric had some respiratory thing then got pink eye, he gave a presentation of Realize the Impossible, sold some stuff, then we went to our respective homes, and hope to do it again next year. Thanks Baltimore!

Originally posted by K C from Just Seeds: Blog, on September 30, 2008 9:12 PM

The upside of writing a book entirely focused on a few Web 2.0 companies is you get to know them -- and their founders and investors-- extraordinarily well. And if you pick wisely, that can be a mighty good career move for a reporter in a crowded field. But the downside is you miss some other startups that are worth getting to know. One of those neglecterinos for me was StumbleUpon, which my brother, Peter, apparently can't live without.

I've since spent a bit of time with Garrett Camp-- Stumble's founder-- at last year's Lobby Conference, an Outcast dinner and this morning at Outcast's offices. Oh, and this coming Saturday at his sure-to-be-raging 30th birthday party on, um, a Navy tanker?

Saturday, we'll no doubt be talking about how OLD he is. Today, we were talking about StumbleUpon's new plans to allow people to discover sites they may like without downloading the toolbar and its plans to have Stumble-like discovery within partner sites the Huffington Post, HowStuffWorks.com and, soon, RollingStone and National Geographic. Also, the homepage has been dramatically redesigned.

It makes sense and is a big move for the startup eBay bought for $75 million last year. StumbleUpon has pretty much locked up the the six million or so early adopters who want to download a toolbar and now it needs to expand. The strategy reminds me of Yelp's: It doesn't need all its users to be active Yelpers writing reviews, but it does need an increasing base of passive Yelpers who use the site as a restaurant or service provider search engine. Also, I like that StumbleUpon sees itself less about finding news -- ala Digg-- and more about finding images and videos, which there is no good search or discovery engine for to date, IMHO.

It's a good strategy and, so far, the implementation looks good too. But the bigger takeaway for me isn't techy or featurey-- it's Garrett Camp continuing to do his job. Frankly, the still-29-until-Saturday founder doesn't have a lock-up with eBay and I don't know how many young founders who've had their first win in his position would still be so committed. Maybe it's that Canadian work ethic, but he sees it as a reputation issue: He doesn't want to be the guy who sells and checks out. Amid the young Web 2.0 hotshots--who notoriously take off as soon as lockups expire-- that makes him a rarity. I hope to have Garrett on TechTicker soon once the financial "OMG!!!!!!" dies down, and we can get back to covering tech.

Originally posted by sarah lacy from SarahLacy.com, on September 30, 2008 9:12 PM

Google Search (2001), a search interface against a Google index from January, 2001 (FAQ)--and in honor of Google's 10th birthday--is really fascinating.

Doing a search against it for things that are common now--Movable Type, for instance; or, even, blog, which returns only 76,000 results!--yield such different results that it's truly like traveling in time, almost, which, I guess, says something for Google's ubiquity and the expectation--or, at least, my expectation--that search results presented in Google's interface actually reflect the current reality. It's disturbing, slightly.

Originally posted by Benjamin Trott from Stupidfool.org, on September 30, 2008 8:51 PM

Twins 0.

Jim Thome home run.

White Sox 1.

2008 AL Central Champs:

Chicago White Sox

Holy.

Crap.

Originally posted by dayf from Cardboard Junkie, on September 30, 2008 6:17 PM

There are a few Mets fans out there who understandably feel like this:


Just remember folks...

It could always be worse. Much worse.

Originally posted by dayf from Cardboard Junkie, on September 30, 2008 6:06 PM

Slate has more on the restored Godfather films I told you about last week.

Luckily, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences had a print of The Godfather that was in perfect condition. (This was the approved master print that Technicolor stored with the academy when the film was complete. It had never been shown in a theater.) So, when Harris & Co. did the digital color correction, they could use this print as a reference. They also worked side by side with Allen Daviau, a brilliant cinematographer who, in turn, consulted by phone with Willis himself. (Harris is a stickler for this sort of thing. When he restored Hitchcock's Vertigo, he asked Jaguar to send him a color chip from the 1957 model of one of its cars -- the same car that Kim Novak drove in the film -- so that he could match the shade of green exactly.)

If you don't want to buy/rent the films, Film Forum in New York is playing the restored films through next Tuesday with other theaters around the country to follow.

(link)

Originally posted by jason@kottke.org from kottke.org, on September 30, 2008 1:49 PM

My friend wrote this great email that has a lot of important information about getting registered to vote.  Don't be ashamed if you haven't registered!  The process is confusing ... on purpose!    Instead of trying to write some clever rehash, I've decided to simply publish it here, word for word.  Her name is Mary and she performs in this great band, amongst other things.  Here's her email and well, my sentiments exactly:

I imagine everyone I'm sending this to (ie YOU!) are probably registered to vote, but you never know!  Lots of people forget or leave it too late.  Each of us needs to make sure we are registered to vote.  Do it today, because the first state deadlines are this week!

Also please forward this information to everyone you can.  Let's not compound the problems this country is facing by disenfranchising tons of voters too (see below).

     • It's easy to register -- just go here.

     • There are also websites to double check that you're already registered to vote.

     • Each state has its own site, so if you want to find out in your own state,
        just do a web search for:  Am I registered to vote in [your state].

     • In New York, go here:

There are a lot of problems in the electoral system right now, some mistakes, and some definitely not.  People who have lost their homes are being purged from the roles in order to disenfranchise minority and low-income voters who vote primarily democratic, and there are plenty of other tactics going on.

Here are a couple of articles about registration problems ranging from people who have recently moved, because of foreclosure or other reasons, who don't realize their registration needs to be renewed, to incorrect information distributed on a college campus to discourage young voters.

Originally posted by Angela Tucker from tuckergurl, on September 30, 2008 1:42 PM

I love this photo of Kristin Scott Thomas, which was on the cover of the NY Times' arts section this weekend. Outside of Annette Bening, Helen Mirren and Anjelica Huston, (the last two are both much older - KST is 47)), I can't think of many other working actresses who actually look their age... and KST looks all the more stunning for it. (Compare her to, say, Meg Ryan, who is only a year younger and just looks absurd.)

I always thought KST was beautiful, but in an untouchable, behind-glass kind of way, but perhaps some of the lines in her face represent cracks in that glass - something more human and real.  Watching the Times' slideshow of her career was like watching someone evolve from a general beauty to a specific one - one that reveals more of who she is and the life she's led.

Originally posted by Valarie Smith from Crazed Teacups, on September 30, 2008 1:26 PM

Shared by Jake Dobkin
it's funny that the future of russia is being decided on livejournal. xanga must be really pissed off.

Annals of Plutocracy: "Gorbachev initiated plans for the new party, said Lebedev on his website, http://alex-lebedev.livejournal.com/141495.html."

Originally posted by (author unknown) from LockhartSteele.com, on September 30, 2008 1:25 PM

“Its body is composed of plasma. It is known to infiltrate electronic devices and wreak havoc” – Pokédex

Pokémon Platinum, released in Japan on September 13th, gives new meaning to those faithful words that our pokédex’s once spoke. As many of you may already know Rotom will be giving a whole new bag of tricks when household appliances run aMUK in Shinnoh! Starting on September 28, 2008 and lasting until November 4, 2008, Nintendo is giving away a secret key to all Pokemon Platinum owners with WIFI access. The secret key unlocks a hidden room in Team Galactic’s hideout in Eterna City and can be downloaded once you have unlocked the mystery gift function.

Obtaining the Secret Key…

To receive the secret key you first have to unlock the mystery gift option. Just like in Diamond & Pearl you simply go to the 3rd floor and tell the news reporter…Everyone / Happy…and then…WI-FI / Connection. This was a little difficult since it’s all in japanese, but I simply checked on my Pearl game to see where the words where located in english and then found them in japanese!

After you have unlocked the mystery gift function, select the Get Via Wireless button and TA-DA!!!

Obtaining Rotom…

Just like in Diamond & Pearl you can only find Rotom inside a TV in the Old Chateau at night. Once you have captured him in platinum or traded him over from Diamond or Pearl you can head to Team Galactic’s hideout.

Taking on new forms…

After you have beaten Team Galactic in Eterna City, go back to the first room. In the upper left hand corner of the room is a hidden entrance that leads to a new room containing 5 household appliances. Simply go up to the wall and press the A button and your secret key will open the hidden entranceway. With Rotom(s) in your party simply stand in front of the appliance that you want Rotom to posses and press the A button. If your Rotom already knows 4 moves then it will ask you if you want to learn a new move depending on which Appliance you pick.

Here is a chart of each of Rotoms’s new forms and the moves it can learn when it posses the applainces…

Additional Facts…

• Rotom will change back to its original form if you select the spot where the appliance it possessing once sat or if you try and trade Rotom while it is possessing an appliance.

• Rotom’s base stats get a boost when it posses the various appliances return to his old stats when it reverts back to its original form.

• All of the Rotom’s transformations are still Electric and Ghost types.

• If you missed out on the secret key event there is still hope!!! Ask a friend who does have the secret key to share the key with you. They can share the key up to 4 times! All they have to do is do is go to the wonder card share the key. All you have to do is go into your Mystery gift function and select the Get From A Friend option. The only draw back is that this is not over WIFI, you have to be close by.

Originally posted by HMTKSteve from Poke Farm, on September 30, 2008 1:12 PM

ready. set. go.
Thanks Jonah for the link.

Originally posted by Other Options from Eyebeam reBlog, on September 30, 2008 1:09 PM

Originally posted by (author unknown) from the real janelle, on September 30, 2008 12:50 PM

Bloomberg to run for third term as NYC Mayor, to push to overturn term limit.

Originally posted by Josh Marshall from Talking Points Memo, on September 30, 2008 12:21 PM

Examiner column for October 1.

    In most subjects, grading is a simple matter of what’s missing. If students have a math or history test on Wednesday, studying the material—applicable formulae in math and the contexts surrounding historic events in history—will most likely yield a high grade. If they miss a logical progression in solving a problem, or a fact and its implications in history, then they will receive a lower grade because of what’s missing.

    In the humanities, and especially English, that sort of formula only works for reading quizzes and work that can be quantified. Command of language, a graceful prose style, and level of complexity are qualities of the best English papers, but can’t be reduced to a formula.

    How we’d love to reduce writing to numbers! Where do you think the attachment to the five-paragraph essay came from? Never mind that it exists only in the classroom (try to find one in your local newspaper or any anthology of contemporary essays), yet many students arrive in college thinking that an essay isn’t “real” unless it has five paragraphs.

    This invented writing form consists of: one introductory paragraph, three containing one example each, and a conclusion that repeats the point of the first paragraph. In my classroom, that would earn a C, at best. And as deadly as the five-paragraph essay is to read, it is beloved by many students and teachers because of its predictability.

    Students would also love for teachers to hand out a grade sheet that would quantify grading standards in writing: 1-3 errors = A, 4-6 errors = B, 7-10 errors= C, more than 10 errors = you don’t want to know.

    Even in the Advanced Composition classes I teach at George Mason University, some students have difficulty understanding that writing is about more than what’s wrong or missing. Papers are graded based on the writer’s clarity, style, concrete examples, level of sophistication, and mechanical correctness. For many, words like “style” and “sophistication” contain a degree of subjectivity they find unsettling.

        Writing is an art, and judging art is subjective. Learning to create something of artistic merit has no easy formula, either. Artists always recommend practice, but native gifts also factor into the learning process. Composing a ballet or a symphony, as well as judging them, all defy quantification. The coach or teacher can merely give guidelines: practice, expose yourself to the best examples of the genre, revise, and follow your passion. That advice works equally well for any art form, including writing.

    Yet I sympathize with students who want some control over how their work is judged. In my high school and college classrooms, I never base the entire grade on subjective standards; I always include quizzes, participation, and completion of work grades along with writing grades. That takes some of the mystery out of the bottom line.

    Yet at its core, grading in the humanities will never be an objective process and will always cause students anxiety. It’s a wonderful moment when students begin to see improvement in their work and realize that they, too, are participants in this subjective journey. Ultimately, the learning process gives students the control they seek.

Originally posted by Erica Jacobs from TeacherTalk, on September 30, 2008 11:55 AM

Beginning November 10th, seven women will begin a public conversation in the margins of Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook. The text of the novel and the readers' conversation will be in a nifty new format designed by Apt Studios in London, similar to, but much more elegant than CommentPress. We'll put up a preview sometime in October. In the meantime here is a brief bio of the seven readers:

Harriet Rubin is best known as the author of The Princessa: Machiavelli for Women, a little bullet of a book on power that is now in its twelfth paperback printing. The book has been published in 27 languages and has been a bestseller in several of them. Rubin currently writes for The NY Times and other publications. She was the founder and publisher of Currency Books/Doubleday, which changed the science and soul of economic thinking. In late Fall 2008, she is launching an on-line publishing program devoted to business, power and leadership.

Helen Oyeyemi was born in Nigeria in 1984 and raised in London. Her first novel, The Icarus Girl, is about a young girl and her imaginary friend. Her second novel, The Opposite House, is a nominee for the 2008 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. Her third novel, White is for Witching, will be published in 2009.

Laura Kipnis is a cultural critic and theorist whose most recent books are Against Love: A Polemic and The Female Thing: Dirt, Sex, Envy, Vulnerability (both from Pantheon); her essays have appeared in Slate, Harper's, Playboy, the Nation, and The New York Times Magazine. Her work has been translated into thirteen languages; she's received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and Yaddo; and she teaches in the Radio-TV-Film Department at Northwestern University (she is a former video artist). Her next book is called How To Become a Scandal.

Lenelle Moïse is an award-winning "culturally hyphenated pomosexual poet," playwright and performance artist. She writes jazz-infused, politically-charged performance texts about Haitian-American culture and the intersection of race, class, gender, sexuality. Moïse blogs regularly for Showtime's OurChart.com. At 20, she co-wrote the screenplay for a Rodrigo Bellot film, Sexual Dependency, which has been screened at dozens of international festivals. Moïse received an MFA in Playwriting from Smith College. Moïse regularly performs her autobiographical one-woman show Womb-Words Thirsting at colleges across the United States and her newest musical Expatriate was produced Off-Broadway at the Culture Project in July 2008 and met with critical acclaim.

Naomi Alderman grew up in London and attended Oxford University and UEA. Her first novel, Disobedience, was published in nine languages; it was read on BBC radio's Book at Bedtime and won the Orange Award for New Writers. In 2007, she was named Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year, and one of Waterstones' 25 Writers for the Future. From 2004 to 2007 Naomi was lead writer on the award-winning alternate reality game Perplex City and in 2008 she wrote the Alice in Storyland game for Penguin's online We Tell Stories project.

Nona Willis Aronowitz is a freelance writer originally from New York City. She is a political and cultural critic who writes about sex, women, youth culture, and music for numerous publications including The Nation, The New York Observer, The Village Voice, VenusZine, and Salon.com. She currently co-writes a blog called GIRLdrive, the content of which will be in an upcoming book of the same name. GIRLdrive is based on a road trip taken across the United States in order to find out what young women think and feel about feminism, and will be published by Seal Press in Fall 2009. She lives in Chicago.

Philippa Levine grew up in an upwardly-mobile, left-wing, working-class family in London. She received her doctorate in history during the Thatcher era when academic jobs were thin on the ground so after a brief stint teaching at the University of East Anglia, she took a post-doctoral fellowship in women's studies in Australia where she combined academic work with radio broadcasting. In 1987 she moved to the US where she has lived since. Her publications include The British Empire, Sunrise to Sunset (2007), Gender and Empire: Oxford History of the British Empire Companion Series (2004) Prostitution, Race and Politics: Policing Venereal Disease in the British Empire (2003). Her current projects include a study of colonial nakedness, and of evolution, eugenics and empire.

Originally posted by kross from if:book, on September 30, 2008 11:52 AM

flat white

Originally posted by (author unknown) from the real janelle, on September 30, 2008 10:19 AM

is it iced coffee weather dot com: finn promised me this site was coming, and now, it is here.

Originally posted by (author unknown) from the real janelle, on September 30, 2008 10:14 AM

From Serious Eats: New York

That's Hodgman as in John Hodgman as in "And I'm a PC." As far as I know, Hodgman has no children. Which might be a good thing. I only hope that the "Mr. Rogers" he refers to here is Fred Rogers, not Kenny Rogers. Related: Eat Me: The Food and Philosophy of Kenny Shopsin

Originally posted by Adam Kuban from Serious Eats, on September 30, 2008 9:55 AM

Last week Zappos.com offered me a $100 gift certificate to try their new clothing shopping "experience", and, after thinking about for a while (Pro: I like shopping online in general, and the Zappos interface in particular; Con: will it damage my Walter-Cronkite-like credibility to take free stuff to write about a shopping site?) I decided that sure, I'd give it a shot.

Honestly, after about an hour of browsing, I almost wrote back and said "thanks but no thanks" -- let's just say my taste in clothing and what was available on Zappos didn't have a lot of overlap. (Which is odd, because I can find a pair of shoes I desperately want on Zappos merely by clicking randomly on any page ...) There are a lot of very trendy clothes on Zappos, which would be a huge selling point for anyone whose fashion sense didn't crystalize roughly twenty years before they were actually born.

I thought for a while about this sweater (also gray, highly rated, and heaven knows I love cardigans) but I haven't been impressed by Three Dots stuff before, so I didn't hit 'buy' on that one.

This morning, though, I realized that I had never replaced my favorite "cozy for around the house, but nice enough to wear out to the post office" gray hooded sweater that got eaten up by SOMETHING (I refuse to countenance the possibility of MOTHS) winter before last. All last winter I tried to find a replacement, but my heart wasn't in it. But now I'm ready to move on.

Finding a gray hooded sweater on Zappos was really easy -- there's a nice drill-down interface, so you don't have to sort through too many irrelevant options. (It did take me a minute to figure out how to filter just for women's clothing, but only a minute.) The *huge*, well-lit, all-angles photos were great, too.

I wish there were actual garment measurements (or, if there were, that I could find them), but looking at the general cut of the clothes on the site (narrow, narrow, and narrower) induced me to order the Large (and Zappos has free shipping both ways, so it's not like making the wrong size choice is gonna cost me another $8.90 in postage).

The price points were a bit towards what I consider the "higher end" (this sweater was $104! Which I would not otherwise spend without a subsidy of at least $50); about the same as a mid-level department store, like Macy's.

Finding a sweater that had a kangaroo pocket was a bonus. I love kangaroo pockets. So cozy ...

In short: Zappos has a lot of clothing-type stuff, mostly geared (as far as I could tell) towards juniors/young misses. (Which is smart on their part, that's who spends a lot of money on clothes!) Their search system is clever and easy to use, which won't surprise anyone who has ever looked for shoes on the site. I would definitely use it again if I were looking for something in particular (like, say, a gray hooded sweater) ... I'm not much for just browsing, though, so I don't know if I'd go to their site just to hang around. I think it will improve as they add more vendors; I would much rather shop at Zappos than on most crappy, Flash-heavy, badly-organized boutique/manufacturers' sites ...

If I had to suggest a feature, I'd love something where I could ask to be notified when something came in that they didn't have any current listings for, like a red short-sleeved cardigan or a kimono-sleeved cardigan, or a way to suggest categories ...

Thus endeth the review. In other retail news, Little Hunting Creek is having a sale this week: ten percent off everything (to make room for holiday merchandise) through October 5 at midnight. The discount code is LHC10.

Originally posted by Erin from A Dress A Day, on September 30, 2008 9:21 AM

Great but waaaay too short article about how Heather Champ and the rest of the Flickr staff build, police, and shape community on the site.

Director of Community Heather Champ doesn't just guard the pool and blow the occasional whistle; it's a far more delicate, and revealing, dance that keeps the user population here happy, healthy and growing. In addressing that question of how much to police and how much to let things be, Champ oversees an experiment that, outside some far-flung and sandy exceptions, one rarely sees in such detail. There are no IEDs or snipers in this place, but it's hard not to conclude Flickr's conducting a kind of nation-building.

Flickr is an inspiring example of how to run a community site in an era where other sites almost delight in taking zero responsibility for what goes on in their comments and forums.

(link)

Originally posted by jason@kottke.org from kottke.org, on September 30, 2008 9:02 AM

In depth tutorial in using the new MySQL Query Profiler (5.0.37+). Looks pretty darn useful.

Originally posted by lhl from random($foo), on September 30, 2008 7:33 AM

Construction of the Sands Street bike path was promised to begin in 2006...

The slow pace of safety improvements for downtown Brooklyn streets became tragically apparent earlier this month when eight-year-old Alexander Toulouse was killed by a postal truck on Livingston Street. A $5 million traffic calming project for the area, unveiled in 2007, is not the only livable streets initiative to suffer delays. The Sands Street bike path, a physically protected approach to the Manhattan Bridge, has languished behind schedule for years, held up in the city's construction bureaucracy. The project serves as a prime illustration that livable streets hinge not just on DOT, but on other, more obscure city agencies as well.

...here's how Sands Street looks today.

In April 2005, Noah Budnick of Transportation Alternatives was riding on Sands Street, after exiting the Manhattan Bridge, and crashed on a dangerous stretch where cyclists often have to contend with deeply pock-marked pavement and cars accelerating onto the Brooklyn Queens Expressway. He sustained severe head trauma, requiring hospitalization and a prolonged recovery.

Two years earlier, Budnick had joined other Brooklyn bike advocates in calling on the Department of Transportation to improve the safety of the very same bridge approach. Borough President Marty Markowitz and City Council member David Yassky pledged support (right). DOT, under the leadership of commissioner Iris Weinshall at the time, did announce plans for a protected bike path on Sands Street -- two months after Budnick's crash. Construction would start in 2006, the agency said.

This June marked the third anniversary of that announcement, and construction on the Sands Street bike path has still not begun. (A contractor is slated to begin work in October.) Last year, a new team took the reins at DOT and dramatically accelerated the pace of bike improvements. But getting this critical safety measure through the different stages of government approval has been slow as molasses. Why?

Capital projects like Sands Street are carried out by the city's Department of Design and Construction, which works with contractors to see DOT's designs through to completion.

The initial DOT design for Sands Street called for a two-way bike path, running along a raised median, protected from car traffic by a fence on both sides. Transportation Alternatives and Community Board 2 lobbied DOT to replace the fence with bollards. A continuous fence, they said, would have kept residents of nearby Farragut Houses from walking across the street midblock, in addition to posing a danger to cyclists by making it harder for them to exit the bike path in case of an emergency. A bike path design using bollards was adopted.

DOT and DDC attempted to fold the bike path project into an existing contract where work was already underway, the reconstruction of Flushing Avenue. DDC put out the $40 million Flushing Avenue bid in 2003. DOT and DDC initially stated that the contractor, Bronx-based firm Demicco Bros., would not agree to incorporate the bike path work into the project.

On Sands Street, cyclists contend with broken pavement and cars getting onto the BQE.

Frank Demicco of Demicco Bros. says his firm was never officially told to do the work. "It was something that was just talked about," he said. The city did not go so far as to issue a change order instructing Demicco to build the bike path. "There's no items in the contract for me to construct that, so it's really illegal for them to give me work without issuing a change order, and the change order might have been too expensive, or whatever they thought. That's probably why they went that route." The city is reluctant to push through such projects by issuing a change order, he added, when it can do the work cheaper through competitive bidding.

In the case of Sands Street, this meant forgoing the originally promised construction timetable and letting the project out to bid again. DDC sent Streetsblog a revised statement after Demicco's version of events was brought to their attention: "At the time this project was requested, the option of adding the path to the active reconstruction project was explored, but due to a number of issues including approvals, funding, and scheduling, it was decided a new procurement would need to take place. It was DDC's decision to proceed as noted above, not the contractor's."

That decision was reached through an internal process known as a change order estimate, wherein DDC projected a price tag for the bike path. When the agency arrived at a figure, work was not allowed to proceed because another city agency, the Office of Management and Budget, rejects change order estimates that exceed 10 percent of the total project cost.

The Sands Street path is now under a separate, $4.6 million contract with a firm called Trocom Construction. When it is finally completed, the path will serve as a critical link in the city's bike network. Just as bridge approaches become choke points for car traffic during peak hours, they also serve large numbers of cyclists, especially bike commuters. The increasing popularity of biking in New York is reflected in the number of cyclists crossing bridges. In 2005, an average of 829 cyclists crossed the Manhattan Bridge every day. In 2006, the last year for which data is available, daily crossings shot up to 1578, a 90 percent increase.

Bridge approaches handle some of the densest bike traffic in the city, and the volume is only going up.

The more people bike across the bridge, the greater the number of potential conflicts between drivers and cyclists. The hazards are amplified on Sands Street, where drivers access two on-ramps to the BQE.

"You're navigating through very high vehicle traffic," says Caroline Samponaro of T.A. "It's essential to have protected space set aside, and proper signage and lighting."

Thousands of cyclists have been put at risk because this project was delayed for two years.

Rendering: NYCDOT

Photos: Aaron Naparstek

Originally posted by Ben Fried from Streetsblog, on September 30, 2008 6:44 AM

designer harry allen has created the ‘wm25 wire stay’ for doug mockett & company. the small cord organizer
uses an extruded rubber piece with has a series of flexible grooves. the user simply pushes the wires into
the grooves where they will be held. simply attached the piece to any surface and your cords will be that
much more tamed. it comes in powder blue, mango and avocado.

http://www.harryallendesign.com
http://www.mockett.com

more

the myriad devices of cable organizers
spacestation by bluelounge design

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Designboom - Weblog, on September 30, 2008 6:34 AM

Almost 40 years ago, the writer Pete Hamill wrote an article in New York magazine declaring Brooklyn "the sane alternative" to Manhattan. "Art galleries are opening. Neighborhoods like Bay Ridge and South Brooklyn now have boutiques and head shops. People who have been driven out of the Village and Brooklyn Heights by the greed of real-estate operators are learning that it is not yet necessary to decamp for Red Bank or Garden City. It is still possible in Park Slope, for example, to rent a duplex with a garden for $200 a month, a half-block from the subway; still possible to buy a brownstone in reasonably good condition for $30,000, with a number of fairly good houses available for less, if you are willing to invest in reconditioning them." This week, Hamill returns after a long hiatus in Manhattan, and finds, not surprisingly, that Park Slope is fancyland, and that some things have been lost in its transformation. "Today, there are dozens of real-estate offices along Seventh Avenue and more on Fifth Avenue, and many houses were going for $2 million and more," he writes. The people he sees on 7th Avenue "are in their twenties, most of them gym-thin. Shoulder bags hang from their shoulders while other bags form humps on their backs. Their thumbs flick across tiny keyboards. They talk into cell phones. They never make eye contact with anyone, as if adhering to some paranoid manual of New York behavior. Instead, they glance into restaurants, hurry past art-supply stores, dress shops, delicatessens, heading to places that are provisional, not permanent, parts of their narrative. They rent." Hard to buy when the places are $2 million, of course. He's not completely nostalgic for the old, old neighborhood, though, the one that was dangerous. As he says, "Gentrification is better than junkies."
Brooklyn Revisited [New York]
Sunset. Photo by arimoore.

Originally posted by lisa from Brownstoner, on September 30, 2008 6:01 AM

He's nuts! Nuts I tell you!

You're Hussein in the membrane, Natty B.

Originally posted by Meg from Cute Overload, on September 30, 2008 5:11 AM

Josh Marshall in "Losing Everything":

My verdict may be a severe one but I think a lot of people -- a lot of former admirers -- are coming around to agreeing with the general outlines. McCain has revealed himself as a liar well outside the permissive standards applied to politicians. He's shown himself to be reckless to the point of instability, repeatedly putting the country at risk (exploiting the Georgia crisis, picking Palin, storming the bailout negotiations) for transparently self-serving reasons. And in too many ways to count, he's conducted his campaign in disgraceful and dishonorable ways.

Originally posted by Michael Sippey from this is sippey.typepad.com, on September 29, 2008 10:29 PM

Manhattan skyline, circa 1940s.
Photo: via New York Architecture Images

In the process of continuing to hate the Museum of Art & Design, Nicolai Ourousoff puts forth his list of the 10 worst buildings in New York City. Not just plain old ugly, but ugly on a urban scale - truly ruining-the-city ugly:

To be included, buildings must either exhibit a total disregard for their surrounding context or destroy a beloved vista. Removing them would make room for the spirit to breathe again and open up new imaginative possibilities.

I have to say its to hard to argue with any of the buildings on his list, but applying his criteria I think he misses a major blight on the city - lower Manhattan. Compare the before, above, with the after, below. What was once a skyline of narrow skyscrapers, permeable from within and without, is now obscured by a wall of banality.

(The tallest building in the 1940s photo is the former City Services Building, for about a week or two the tallest building in the world (and at least for the moment, the AIG building. In the contemporary photo, you can barely see the gorgeous spire of City Services peeking out over the glass trapezoid at the foot of Pine Street.)

Manhattan skyline, circa 2008. Photo: Virtual Tourist

Originally posted by Halden from Brooklyn 11211, on September 29, 2008 6:11 PM

Chris Carter got a taste of the big leagues this season, now he’s flying to Anaheim in case a spot opens up on the Red Sox’ postseason roster; the health status of both Mike Lowell and JD Drew remaining in question as of Monday afternoon’s workout at Fenway Park. (The Red Sox don’t need to announce their postseason roster until Wednesday morning.)  A 26-year-old outfielder, the lefty-swinging Carter got two cups of coffee this year, the first coming in early June and the other in September.  Acquired from the Diamondbacks – via the Nationals – in August 2007, the Stanford product spent most of this year in Triple-A Pawtucket where he hit .300/.356/.515 with 24 home runs.

On the playoff atmosphere in Boston:  “I’m starting to realize, and get a feeling, about Red Sox Nation and what that really encompasses.  There’s a history to Red Sox Nation, there’s a history to Fenway Park, and just being a part of this team really means a lot more than just being a major league baseball player.  This team is focused on winning a World Series, and this town is focused, and I can feel it right now.  And it’s a really cool feeling; a feeling I never really thought about, because my focus has always been on getting to the major leagues.  Now, being with a playoff team is exciting.”

On what it means to have hit .333 (6-for-18) in first big league season:  “You know what, there weren’t a lot of at-bats, but I think I’m starting to show people that if there’s a pinch-hitter role, maybe I can come in?  I’m just trying to show everyone that I can hit, so I don’t think (the numbers) hurt.”

On Kevin Youkilis and Dustin Pedroia:  “It’s amazing how hard those guys play, and how good they are, and how they’re able to change the game and help the team win.  They really slow the game down and kind of control it; they kind of manipulate it into a way where they want to win.  Dustin hitting doubles and playing great defense; Youk driving in runs and hitting home runs.  It’s great to see two guys really control a game, and know that they’re on your team, because that’s a tremendous asset to have.  It makes for a lot of confidence every game to know that those two guys are in the lineup.”

On Joe Mauer, Justin Morneau and the AL MVP Award:  “Those guys have both put up numbers, and I think I like Morneau’s numbers better than I like Mauer’s; I like those RBIs and stuff.  But just seeing what Dustin and Youkilis do every day, and not just offensively, but defensively – I know that Mauer is a catcher, but defensively there’s not a better second baseman, and there’s not a better first baseman than Kevin Youkilis.  And Kevin Youkilis has also played third base and been a tremendous asset being able to play multiple positions.  I think you have to take that into consideration when you’re looking at the offensive numbers.  I think you have to give the MVP to one of our guys, either Youk or Pedroia.”

Originally posted by David Laurila from Baseball Prospectus: Unfiltered, on September 29, 2008 5:20 PM

You know, I want to be excited by this. It looks like they even got Marvin from Pulp Fiction. You know, the guy they accidently shoot and have to call Harvey Keitel to mop up the blood. Well, I don't see a credit for Back on Topps on his imdb.com page, but that really looks like him.

I also like the reference to the "cocaine out of a bread truck," though if we remember back to last year, I believe it was a Mr. Softee truck out in Jamaica, Queens, where the driver was selling cocaine on the side. (His trick? Double-cupping the sundaes. Ingenious.)

So yeah, I want to get excited. But you know what would really get me jazzed on this series--and yes, I just said 'jazzed', which hopefully came across in a completely non-sexual way, though now that I've taken the energy to explain probably does come across as sexual--?

I think you know...

That's right: a re-occurring character who either appears in a dream sequence or within the wacky corporate world of Topps HQ who also happens to be on a mini Allen & Ginter card (or 1975 Topps Mini). Or is Lil' Kwame Brown.

This character would best be played by a real-life athlete, with his character name simply his real name with 'Baby' or 'Lil'' in front of it. Like "Baby Rafael Furcal" or "Lil' Dmitri". Actually, that last one's not bad. Get Dmitri Young on the phone to play the Topps egghead archivist (who expounds on his love of gem mint cards and also happens to be trapped on a mini A & G card).

Originally posted by Ben Henry from The Baseball Card Blog, on September 29, 2008 5:13 PM

In an excerpt from the soon-to-be-released More Information Than You Require, John Hodgman shares how he became a famous minor television personality and how he deals with all that fame.

As a matter of fact, sometimes now, if I'm feeling tired or a little sad, I'll go put on my UPS-man outfit and hit the subway. I'll hope that maybe someone will recognize me. It's very embarrassing, isn't it? But most of the time, it doesn't happen. No matter how crowded it is, no one says anything. They are reading, talking, thinking about where the train is taking them next. They don't say anything to me at all. And that's when I sit back, and look at them all, and think to myself: Don't any of you have a television? What THE FUCK is wrong with you people? I'M SITTING RIGHT HERE!

Some of this is from a bit Hodgman did for an episode of This American Life earlier this year.

(link)

Originally posted by jason@kottke.org from kottke.org, on September 29, 2008 4:59 PM

Kent Nerburn on a cab ride he'll never forget.

For the next two hours, we drove through the city. She showed me the building where she had once worked as an elevator operator. We drove through the neighborhood where she and her husband had lived when they were newlyweds. She had me pull up in front of a furniture warehouse that had once been a ballroom where she had gone dancing as a girl.

(via dooce)

(link)

Originally posted by jason@kottke.org from kottke.org, on September 29, 2008 2:26 PM

Filed under: Software

Perian, the ultimate QuickTime plug-in, was just updated to version 1.1.1. Some of the changes in this version include:

• H.264 in AVI fixed
• Some anamorphic AVI files are now supported
• Performance problems due to PIC fixed with Xcode 3.1
• Incorrect frame skipping on H.264 intra frames fixed
• Better character set detection
• The update checker is now much more polite
• Several parsing and rendering bugs with subtitles fixed
• Player freezing while loading subtitles with embedded fonts fixed
• Audio fixed for some older MKV files with AAC/FLAC
• Strange values in MKV chapters or video sizes are handled better
• Initial support for SAMI subtitles added
• Worked around a QuickTime bug (#5770288) causing frames to be lost during export
• New codecs: DosBox ZMBV, VP6+Alpha, Nellymoser ASAO
FFmpeg:
• Crashing on PPC G3 fixed
• Fraps decoding artifacts fixed

You can view the full change log on the support website. Perian is a free System Preference pane that can be downloaded from the Perian project website.

Thanks, Chris!

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

Originally posted by Cory Bohon from The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW), on September 29, 2008 1:45 PM

Ever wonder what the Apple Store hiring process is like? Read on for details. Hint: it's much like other retail positions, but with a pretty nice 401k plan.

Read More...

Originally posted by jeff.smykil@gmail.com (Jeff Smykil) from Infinite Loop, on September 29, 2008 1:21 PM

I recently visited En Japanese Brasserie to learn more about Chef Yasuhiro Honma's fantastic cooking. As regular readers of the Report know, En, a branch of a Tokyo restaurant group, is one of my favorite restaurants in New York (my top picks here). Chef Honma, who cooked at En in Japan before moving here, creates a modern izakaya cuisine at the restaurant -- a procession of elegant tapas-style plates highlighting seasonal ingredients. He graciously showed me how to prepare a few of his wonderful dishes, which I will share with you over the next week. I decided to focus on his dashi-infused dishes (age bi dashi), because it's such a great technique to delicately flavor vegetables -- and it's simple to prepare at home. Also, as an added bonus, Chef Honma taught me how to prepare his knockout duck breast -- one of my favorite dishes at En! Here are the dishes coming up:

1. Japanese Mushrooms Steeped in Dashi
2. Fried Eggplant Served with Dashi
3. Mild Japanese Peppers with Kobu Seaweed
4. Sautéed Duck Breast with Grated Daikon in Ponzu Citrus Soy

Originally posted by Harris Salat from The Japanese Food Report, on September 29, 2008 12:55 PM

To make up for the incredibly boring eight days that was New York Fashion Week, the rumors from Paris Fashion Week are piling up just as the ceremonies are getting under way:

First up, Martin Margiela may - finally and actually - be giving up fashion for good, the rumor coming in from everybody everywhere, and with some astutely pointing out that Martin Margiela himself does not even work on the line, so a replacement would be that much easier (though since Raf's been counted out due to his newly signed three year contract with Jil Sander, who else is supposedly up for the job?) Supposedly, he'll announce his retirement from fashion sometime soon...

Next: Alessandra Facchinetti, whose collection for Valentino this coming Thursday will be only her second, and already the Daily reports that it's her last chance, her future at the house resting completely in the hands of the editors and buyers in the front row. And there's more - the supposed replacement? Giambattista Valli, who some supposedly feel could bring more innovation to the line, maybe because he's French, maybe because he's older...

Guess we'll know where everybody stands by next week - kind of makes the rumors on Gossip Girl tonight seem a little passé, mais non?

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Fashionista, on September 29, 2008 12:44 PM

All of you 220,000 RSS subscribers to COOL TOOLS should detect little difference, but all of you 450,000 unique visitors to the website should notice a redesign. This new layout tweak piggybacks on an upgrade to the Movable Type blogging software undergirding this site. Because of this upgrade we now have user comments available for each cool tool. Click on the blue COMMENTS button at the bottom of each review to see the comments so far, or to add yours. Yes, please add yours. We'll be moderating comments closely to be sure they are constructive. This is your chance to add your own experience, positive or negative, to the usual COOL TOOLS rave.

The new design also makes it easier to access the 5 year's worth of previous reviews on the site. We've devised a visual grid which should allow you to browse the back list quickly and smartly. Clicking on a category on the left hand list (in gray) will bring you to the grid.

If you prefer to see more of them in abbreviated form, click on the LIST view in the upper right. Or if you want to systematically study the archives in full-review mode, as one long scroll, click on the FULL view. (Currently, not all the thumbnails of past items have been upgraded and imported into the new design. That should happen soon. In the meantime they are rendered as gray boxes.) You can also choose to view the archives chronologically. The monthly pages permit the same three views: GRID, LIST and FULL.

COOL TOOLS' new design was created by Thomas Marban. Thomas is the genius behind Popurls, which, for the past two years, has been and continues to be the first website I visit each morning. In a previous review I raved about Popurl's fantastic dashboard for blogosphere. It is a meta-aggregator; it aggregates the blog aggregators. On one big page you can skim over what the major blogs are saying, and dip deeper with a mouse-over, or click on it for the actual story. It is much much faster than any  RSS reader. You can scan the major blogs in about 5 minutes. Marban's Popurls was the inspiration for many imitators, including Guy Kawasaki's AllTop, but Popurls is much more useful because it remains a well-design one page. So well-designed in fact that I asked Thomas to re-design COOL TOOLS. Besides the two improvements I mentioned, there are others sprinkled through the site. Like any redesign there are some implementation bugs; if you find one, let me know. Marban is now innovating other cool tools, which are worth inspecting.

Putting Marban's design into code was the job of MT-master Wayne Bremser. It's not easy overhauling a ship while it is still cruising, but that is what upgrading and redesigning a large 5-year-old blog site with no down time is like. Wayne is an ace programmer and designer himself. I recommend him highly.

Finally, we encountered some security issues in our site during the upgrade. There was a weird hack that was scary because even after inspecting the logs we had no idea how the leeches got in. It was very subtle. No one would see anything amiss in COOL TOOLS unless you googled a few common spam words. Then you'd see a parasitic page on our site that was pirating our Google-juice. We had deep parasites and we didn't even know it. Anyway, turns out when you have this kind of disease you need a specialist. Tony Hansmann is a UNIX security expert, who came, looked, saw, and made a few very select, very deliberate moves and sealed the holes. It was like watching a judo black belt make the exact minimal essential stroke. Or a doctor diagnosing the site's health. He can do a lot of other esoteric high-end cures, but Hansmann is basically a website doctor.  Also highly recommended.

All the while Camille Cloutier made sure each day's review was up and in good order. I am constantly amazed at the amount of energy required to keep an active blog site going. It's like tending a zoo or garden. Not a day goes by that something falters, breaks, needs an upgrade, or tweaking, or some kind of attention.  Doing nothing is not an option because the world moves around us. New versions of browsers, no versions of readers, new gadgets, new features all require us to keep working on the site. Let us know how we can make it better.

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Cool Tools, on September 29, 2008 12:32 PM

The 2008 Mets have become just the 7th team in baseball history to have four players on their team appear in 159+games in the same season.  Here’s the list via B-R.com PI:

 Year Lg Team                              Number Players Matching
+----+--+---------------------------------+------+-----------------------------------------+
 2008 NL New York Mets                          4 Carlos Beltran / David Wright / Carlos Delgado / Jose Reyes
 1968 NL Chicago Cubs                           4 Billy Williams / Ron Santo / Don Kessinger / Randy Hundley
 1965 NL Cincinnati Reds                        4 Pete Rose / Deron Johnson / Vada Pinson / Tommy Harper
 1964 NL St. Louis Cardinals                    4 Ken Boyer / Curt Flood / Dick Groat / Bill White
 1962 AL Los Angeles Angels                     4 Leon Wagner / Albie Pearson / Lee Thomas / Billy Moran
 1962 NL San Francisco Giants                   4 Jose Pagan / Willie Mays / Orlando Cepeda / Chuck Hiller
 1961 AL Detroit Tigers                         4 Rocky Colavito / Jake Wood / Bill Bruton / Norm Cash

Originally posted by Steve Lombardi from Stat of the Day, on September 29, 2008 12:08 PM

It’s been a bit quiet around here as I took some needed time off in Indonesia, Connecticut and St. Joseph’s Medical Center in Pennsylvania. (That last one will take some explaining in a personal blog post when I get a chance.)

Before I resume my regular blogging activities here I thought I’d recap some of the noteworthy MT happenings that went down over the past couple of months.

The most significant is the official release of MT 4.2 and the inclusion of the Community Solution with all paid licenses. This community-enabled version has been dubbed Movable Type Pro. MT 4.2 was primarily focused on performance improvements through code optimization, caching, and some smart interface tweaks. The TypePad AntiSpam was later added. The bundling of the Community Solution was a welcome surprise and one that takes MT into something more than just a blogging or simple CMS platform. I highly recommend all users upgrade to this version. It’s really worth it no matter what your situation.

DevLounge coverage is here including some gotchas to upgrading. We also suggest you read up on What’s New, the performance enhancements and how you can take advantage of them in your system. Also be sure to read the MT 4.2 upgrade guide before attempting to do so.

More here from the Industry Standard on the MT 4.2 release

I was involved in a discussion about the future of the MTOS code based and posted an initial plan to the MT wiki. This is something I need to find the time to return to in order to further.

A number of new and interesting plugins have been released.

Byrne Reese released two plugins that Six Apart have been using. Forum Utilities adds features such as promoting comment to an entry, highlighting comments, and closing conversations quickly and easily from the MT interface. This is particularly timely given the wider availability of community features in MT.

The other plugin, SuperPage, from MT’s esteemed product manager, was developed to aid Six Apart’s own documentation efforts and converts a single, massive MT page into a set of easy to navigate pages divided into chapter and section.

For all those wishing to produce a simple iPhone-compatible version of their site, Taichi Kaminogoya has released an iPhone Template Set for MT, that gives you the basics and a good jumping off point for something more sophisticated and customized.

Six Apart and JumpBox have announced the release of Virtual Movable Type. Six Apart writes “the virtual appliance automatically installs Movable Type and all necessary infrastructure on a single virtual machine, thus eliminating the complex task of configuring server applications.” Jesse Gardner of PlasticMind weighs in here as does WebMonkey here and InfoWorld.

Back in early August, Yahoo announced that their formerly experimental geolocation platform FireEagle was now officially opening up to all users. In the announcement it was noted that MT “will get automatic location reporting for its authors and in its Action Stream service.” Sounds interesting and I look forward to seeing what becomes of that collaboration.

Six Apart’s David Recordon announced on the mtos-dev mailing list that the OpenID 2 branch that that has been under development has been merged in the MTOS core trunk now. You can count on those features showing up in the next major release of MT.

Six Apart engineer Beau Smith ported the Sandbox semantic template set framework for MT. Beau has also been hard at work on Vanilla that “provides various template sets which only contain the code necessary to show a specific feature in Movable Type. These template sets are not intended to be used for publishing your blog, but rather to be used for learning how to add a particular feature.” Learning about MT’s default templates and features? Start with Vanilla and start working your way through the ever improving documentation.

Speaking of template sets, Six Apart’s Jim Ramsey released the elegant Mid Century template set for MT. I love it and it has lots of potential for being tweaked and customized for your own uses. (My gold standard for any template set.) Anil Dash has already done so on his personal blog.

Last, but not least Arvind is back to writing his Movable Type Monday articles for the Blog Herald — well at least for a couple of weeks he was. College students. What can you do. The last two releases are here and here. Arvind’s articles are always essential reading (when he’s not cramming for an exam or traveling) for keeping up on the great work the MT community is doing.

Lots of good stuff and more to come.

We now return to our regular blog programming.

Originally posted by Timothy Appnel from Code / Appnel Solutions, on September 29, 2008 11:50 AM

Originally posted by (author unknown) from the real janelle, on September 29, 2008 11:28 AM

As always, I am trying to be everywhere at once. Here's where I've succeeded:

• Dan Costa at PC Magazine offers a look at the rise of micro social networks. I get a nod there, but it's more satisfying to see the idea itself take off. That's an idea that Chris and I revisited at the BlogWorld conference last week, along with a discussion of blogging becoming an industry.
• There's a pleasantly inexplicable passing mention of me in reference to the Web 2.0 Expo here in New York. In case it's not been clear in the past, I am delighted that the tech industry in NYC is closely linked to other industries like media and finance. It gives us a useful perspective and makes tech companies in NYC wiser and less prone to falling into the echo chamber that frustrates me about a lot of Silicon Valley companies. And I never liked the name "Silicon Alley" anyway.
• The South Asian Journalists Association invited me to participate in the first of two conversations about the South Asian blogging community. I thought a lot of the points raised were pretty interesteing, and am a big fan of the SAJA blog, so this was a lot of fun.
• The less said about this, the better. I'm looking at you, Andy.

Originally posted by Anil from Anil Dash, on September 29, 2008 10:44 AM

PHP refuses to let you report a bug in any version of PHP older than the absolute latest & greatest.

At work today, we discovered a bug with PDO, the PHP version of Perl's DBI. Turns out if you pass in too many bind parameters, PDO segfaults. Here's the simple program that Pete Krawczyk put together to exercise it.

 true,
    PDO::ERRMODE_EXCEPTION => true,
) );

$array = Array();
for ($i = 1; $i < 10; $i++) {
    $array[] = $i;
    $sth = $dbh->prepare('SELECT 1 FROM USERS WHERE CUSTID = ? LIMIT 1');
    $sth->execute($array);
    while ( $sth->fetch( PDO::FETCH_NUM ) ) {
        # do nothing
    }
    unset($sth);
    print "PDO lived OK with $i bind" . ($i == 1 ? '' : 's') . "\n";
}
?>

It's repeatable for us on PHP 5.2.5. So after searching to see that nobody else had already reported it on bugs.php.net, I went to report it.

Alas, when I went to report the bug, I was not able to. My bug happened in 5.2.5, but according to the dialog, that wasn't an option. No, I was left with "Earlier? Upgrade first!"

No, PHP, I am not going to upgrade my PHP installation in order to be blessed with the opportunity of telling you about a segfault in a version of software one minor revision older.

No, PHP, I am not going to spend an hour building and installing another monolithic PHP on some test server so that I might gain the privilege, the privilege I say!, of helping out your project.

What a backwards way to look at open source development! "You must be at least this tall in order to report bugs." What a way to help scare away contributors.

Perhaps you should have a look at how Perl handles it, where we have a wide open ticketing system. There's a tool called perlbug that ships with Perl to encourage responses. The perl5-porters might get some inappropriate bug reports, maybe in a module rather than core Perl, but those are easily closed. We don't put up barriers to reporting. We know how to treat the outside world, because we welcome the feedback.

Get a clue, PHP people.

Originally posted by Andy Lester from Perl Buzz, on September 29, 2008 10:04 AM

When the Mets stepped on the field Sunday afternoon, they were tied for the wild card, with the fate of both their season and Shea Stadium within control.

Nine innings later, both were history.

Here is the last time the Mets charged onto Shea's field of dreams.

Final record at Shea: 1859 wins, 1713 losses

Originally posted by Kingman from Loge 13, on September 29, 2008 9:58 AM

The Washington Post takes a stroll through Manhattan, circa the Mad Men era.

Sterling Cooper, as every fan with a pause button knows, is at 405 Madison Ave., an address that...does not exist. If it did exist, it would be where a bank of Chase ATMs is now, not the ideal spot to spend the morning, but don't worry, soon it will be 11:30 and time for your first cocktail.

One place the article doesn't mention is Lutèce, the fancy French place frequented by the bigwigs in the show. It closed in 2004. (thx, jake)

(link)

Originally posted by jason@kottke.org from kottke.org, on September 29, 2008 9:13 AM

As part of their monster 40th anniversary celebration, New York magazine has some notes from the past four decades of food and dining in NYC. Gael Greene remembers her favorite meal as a restaurant critic and also lists the 14 most important NYC restaurants over the past 40 years. No Union Square Cafe? Meyer deserves some credit for taking the stuffiness out of NYC dining.

Legendary chef André Soltner and David Chang share a conversation about the state of food in the city. When Soltner was asked if he did interviews, he replied:

If they came to Lutèce, if they came to my kitchen, yes. I would not go out. If they asked me to go to Chicago to do a fund-raising dinner, it was, "No." If they asked me to come to give me a prize or whatever, I said, "Only on Sundays, when I'm not in the kitchen." I was sort of a slave to my restaurant. And my wife too. I don't say it was right. Today, I maybe say it was wrong. Years ago, in Paris, we had no money. But when we were more comfortable, maybe twenty years later, I said, "Simone, you know, you've paid your dues and everything, I buy you whatever you wish." I was thinking to buy her a ring or a necklace or something like that. "Whatever you wish, tell me." She looked at me and said, "Take me to a movie." For twenty years, I hadn't taken her to a movie. I woke up. I said, "Oh my God, what did I do to my wife?"

And finally but wonderfully, a timeline of food in NYC. The first McDonald's opened here in 1972 and Starbucks in 1994. Hanger steak was big in 1990.

(link)

Originally posted by jason@kottke.org from kottke.org, on September 29, 2008 8:13 AM

Marlins C Paul Lo Duca, speaking to reporters following yesterday’s season-ending defeat of the Mets, said:

“Let’s put it this way, I’ll sleep well tonight…I have a lot of friends over there, I feel for them and for their fans.  But, I feel nothing for their upper management.”

In 67 games for the Nationals and Marlins this season, Lo Duca hit .243 with no home runs and just 15 RBI.

…i heard an unconfirmed story yesterday that, on Friday night, in front of Mike Piazza, Tom Seaver and other Mets notables, Marlins SS Hanley Ramirez proclaimed, ‘There will be no post-season in New York this season, gentlemen.’…like i said, i don’t know that this is 100 percent true, but does it matter…seriously…

…what’s interesting is that, despite the Phillies winning the NL East for the second-straight season, and despite all the agony that has been caused by Bobby Cox and the Braves over the years, it is the Marlins who i hope to go 0–162 next season…

ShareThis

Originally posted by Matthew Cerrone from MetsBlog.com, on September 29, 2008 6:54 AM

Could CBS really still be sitting on the most embarrassing parts of the Couric/Palin trainwreck interview?

Originally posted by Josh Marshall from Talking Points Memo, on September 29, 2008 6:38 AM

From A Hamburger Today

Congratulations to Joey Chestnut for winning this weekend's Krystal Square Off World Hamburger Eating Championship by downing 93 Krystal hamburgers in eight minutes. Legendary rival Takeru Kobayashi only ate 84 hamburgers, putting him in third place, and second place went to Patrick “Deep Dish” Bertoletti for eating 85 hamburgers. This is the second year in a row Chestnut has taken first place; last year he won by eating 103 hamburgers. For full results, read the Krystal Square Off Blog.

Related: Fifth Annual Krystal Square Off World Hamburger Eating Championship

Originally posted by Robyn Lee from Serious Eats, on September 29, 2008 6:30 AM

Turner didn’t paint AT-ATs, but if he did…

(via

b3ta

)

Originally posted by finn from Modcult, on September 29, 2008 6:17 AM

Originally posted by (author unknown) from the real janelle, on September 29, 2008 5:45 AM

According to Jon Heyman at SI.com, ‘the Mets will retain manager Jerry Manuel in 2009.’

Manuel was 55-38 as the team’s manager after taking over for Willie Randolph in May.

Mets GM Omar Minaya, regarding Manuel, while speaking to reporters following yesterday’s game:

“I sat down and talked to him.  I’m going to sit down with ownership and give them my recommendation, because he is an interim manager.  But I told him the same thing I’m telling you guys: that I was very pleased.  The job that he did, I thought, was a very good job.  I think if you talked to the players, they would tell you that he did a very good job.”

David Wright, regarding Manuel, said:

“What Jerry’s done here has been remarkable.  You won’t find a guy in this clubhouse that doesn’t look up to Jerry, doesn’t respect Jerry, and think that Jerry’s one of the best baseball minds in the game.  I’ll forever owe Jerry quite a bit, not only for this year but for what he’s taught me since he’s been here.  Jerry has my utmost respect.”

Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post's poll.

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Originally posted by Matthew Cerrone from MetsBlog.com, on September 29, 2008 4:53 AM

More on the story here.

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Wooster Collective, on September 29, 2008 4:46 AM

The day I have dreaded for years arrived September 28, 2008.

The Shea Stadium doomsday clock was right. Today was the last game in our old ballpark.

And of course, Shea would not leave this world without a fight.

We couldn't have the post season wrapped up tight on a balmy Indian summer afternoon. Oh no, we had to go into today tied with the Brewers for the wild card, our already churning emotions further swirled by the fervor of a pennant race. Today could be the end of Shea, the end of the season...or the prelude to a wild card tie breaker, or (with a Cub win) a jaunt into the NLDS and a chance to take my kids to their first playoff game in Shea's last year.

You could say I was stressed.

The weather was as uncooperative as the Phillies. The Sunday forecasts called for sun and mid-70's.. I woke up to heavy cloud cover and steady showers as I headed to the train. Figures.

But you knew this is how Shea would go out - cold and wet and in chaos. Just like April, 1985 when Gary Carter hit his first game winning home run as a Met while we all huddled around heaters in the upper deck bathroom. Just like that blustery game 7 in 1986, an event delayed one day by massive downpours Just like Todd Hundley night when the skies opened up as the Mets honored our new home run catcher king (just before they exiled him to left field for a new king).  Just like countless April and September nights in our Monday/Wednesday/Thursday plans when the only knuckleheads in the stadium were us and the ones in uniform on the field.

Shea was going out gritty and nasty today, just like we always knew she would.

And ultimately the Mets just went out nasty, doing Shea a massive disservice by surrendering to the Marlins 4-2, while the Brewers won 3-1 over the Cubbies.

Just like that the season was over.

And Shea was over.

And my lifetime of memories had lost their mooring - our precious blue and orange concrete horseshoe was gone.

So much happened today that one post probably won't do.  I will save my thoughts on the closing ceremony for later...after I can think straight again.

Today began great. I started at Grand Central a bit after 11 AM. I thought I  might get lucky and catch an old 7 train that the MTA had put back into commission for one more ride to Shea. Instead, as I stood on the Eastbound platform, a set of old subway cars rode by me heading to Times Square, a mix and match of antique red and gray ghosts from the 1950's, 1960's, 1970's and 1980's. Before I could get my camera out the trains were gone, receding into the darkness, now just like Shea.

Here is what the final ride into Shea Stadium looked like on the 7 train:




Outside Shea, the crowds were already swelling at 11:30 AM. I hung out near the Diamond Club offices where some Met legends were already arriving. I got to see Rusty, Bud Harrelson and Ed Charles walk by.



The rains were coming down thick and heavy, so I headed in. I slowly wandered my way up to the Upper Deck, stopping at each section to take some photos. Here was the Mezzanine view of Shea Stadium's soggy field, before game time.



By the time I made the Upper Deck, above gate A,  I could see the red carpet and some of the Met legends coming in from the SNY outdoor studio.



I saw Doc Gooden and Seaver walk in together. Also saw Todd Zeile, Teufel, Dykstra and others. Each time a player came in, the corridors of Shea exploded in joy. The rain wasn't washing out the fan frenzy.

The game finally started at 2:00. Oliver Perez did his best to keep us in the game until the 6th. The story of the day (and the weekend): Mets hitters didn't show up. We scored a total of 5 runs against the Marlins in the series. You can't do that and expect to be competitive. Carlos Beltran's 2-run home run to tie the game was electrifying. Sadly, it was the last Met home run in Shea history.

But not the last home run. In the top of the 8th, with the score still tied, Manuel decided to remove Brian Stokes (why?) for Scott Schoenweis. He promptly gave up a home run and the lead, thus securing his name as the answer to the trivia question: "Who lost the last game in Shea history?"

The season ended right there. The Mets could not recover and when the last out was recorded, the 2008 season was finished and Shea Stadium was doomed.

Tomorrow they will begin dismantling Shea Stadium. Someday soon, I will get a refund check from the Mets for the post season tickets not being used this year. Then the denizens of Loge13 will have no more business connection with the New York Mets organization, after 24 years.

It has been an emotional day on many levels. All there is left to say is: thanks for the memories, Shea Stadium. Thanks for the great times at the ballgame, Marv and everyone in Loge13. And thanks to my parents, with whom I shared hundreds of fantastic games at Shea. It's been a big part of our lives and a friend to the family for several generations. You will never be forgotten.

Originally posted by Kingman from Loge 13, on September 28, 2008 7:49 PM

Longtime Loge13 reader and pal Bobster sent along his thoughts and this photo tonight:

Mr. Met has plenty of reason to cry today. For one thing, the Mets lost their final game of the season and were eliminated from any postseason play. But even more, today marked the very last baseball game ever played at Shea Stadium.

Shea opened in April 1964, back when the Mets were a very bad expansion team. I saw my first ballgame there in July 1965 when my dad took me to see the Mets play. My mom had clipped out coupons from Borden's milk cartons, so we got to sit in the grandstands - also called general admission - for free. I didn't know a lot about baseball back then, as my dad wasn't really a fan, but a seed was planted that day. By 1969, the year of the Miracle Mets, I was a diehard fan.

Shea has seen some great things in those 45 seasons, including the two World Series championships in '69 and '86. But now it's history. The place will be dismantled and a parking lot will replace it. The Mets will play right next door, in Citi Field.

This ticket stub is from the 1968 season. I mostly sat high up in the grandstands because of the affordable price - $1.30 was a good deal. (A comic book cost 12 cents back then).

Originally posted by Kingman from Loge 13, on September 28, 2008 7:18 PM

We didn't know it at the time but this was the last 7th inning stretch ever at beloved Shea Stadium.

Originally posted by Kingman from Loge 13, on September 28, 2008 6:52 PM

Raul Andres Jump3 from raul gutierrez on Vimeo.

Related: Bounce

Filed under: daily life
Tags: jumping, raul andres

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Heading East, on September 28, 2008 5:56 PM

Collected by advertnews.com

Elke Krause, Janine Mompour, Kristina Möckel

Shawna Laken, Tony Kalathara

Doritos bags are printed on pockets of sweatshirts.

Jeongjyn Yi

A Sony PSP is painted around an actual tennis court.

Jeongjyn Yi

Victor Holanda, Moises de Oliveira

Andrew Seagrave

Peter Delgado

Help plant more. greenpeace.com

Sungkwon Ha

To promote match.com

Noah Phillips

Jeseok Yi

Originally posted by bspcn from The Best Article Every day, on September 28, 2008 5:37 PM

Courts have cleared the way for 1520 Sedgwick, the birthplace of hip-hop, to be sold next week.

This comes after a year in which the courts first blocked the sale of the building, and tenants of the historic building where Cindy Campbell and DJ Kool Herc threw their first party raised $10 million to buy the building back. Efforts by the efforts of the Campbells and affordable housing activists were also made to grant the building historic preservation status.

This from the article:

“While the owners of 1520 Sedgwick have a legal right to buy out of the Mitchell-Lama program, the building’s residents have made an offer that we believe is more than fair,” said Shaun Donovan, the commissioner for the housing preservation department. “In this light, it is difficult to understand why the owners would choose to put the affordability of over 100 families’ homes at risk.”

More on this shortly...

Originally posted by Zentronix from zentronix: dubwise & hiphopcentric, on September 28, 2008 11:26 AM

Kathleen (and possibly one other person, I'm sorry, I can't remember!) gave me the heads-up about this fabric, and I finally got around to buying some today. I think I bought five yards, which is A LOT, but then again, you can't skimp on a dress made with EXCLAMATION POINTS!!! Exclamation Points need a lot of *volume*, I think.

Although, in fact, the first thing that comes to mind is to make the yellow-birds dress again, in black (or maybe red?), with the exclamation points as the collar, cuffs, and pockets. What do you all think?

I also secretly want http://equilter.com/cgi-bin/webc.cgi/st_prod.html?p_prodid=99011&sid=93LKiA1@SHdS6hH-48108604522.55 (not so secretly now) but I don't know why. And usually I don't have a thing for butterflies. I think it's the deep plum color.

Of course, I completely forgot to take a picture of my dress yesterday, but there was somebody taking photographs at the event, so I have high hopes of getting one somehow. Photos from last week Thursday and Friday to come soon ...

Originally posted by Erin from A Dress A Day, on September 28, 2008 10:34 AM

Link: http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com...

Not sure whether to be amused or deeply disturbed about this - they didn’t even need to write any jokes for a whole section of the sketch. They just reenacted portions of her actual interview with Katie Couric.

Contribute: Add an image, link, video or comment »

Originally posted by (author unknown) from BuzzFeed - Latest, on September 28, 2008 8:34 AM

Rick Rubin in the Wall Street Journal

Originally posted by jeb from Modcult, on September 28, 2008 3:57 AM