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December 13, 2008
MySQL QA Team Benchmarks for MySQL 5.1.30
As you might have seen MySQL QA Team has published their benchmarks for MySQL 5.0.72 and 5.1.30.
It is interesting to compare with results I posted previously
The quote from the results mentioned above:
“Maybe you’ve seen some claims by others in the MySQL community that MySQL 5.1 runs slower than MySQL 5.0. Maybe you’ve also seen some claims by others in the MySQL community that MySQL 5.1 runs faster than MySQL 5.0.
Guess what? They’re both right. “
But is it really what results are telling us ?
I do not think so. When you’re doing benchmarks you should be comparing best performance settings for given application and conditions. For example it is unfair to compare results with different innodb_buffer_pool_size or innodb_flush_log_at_trx_commit but for innodb_thread_concurrency - you should be picking the value which makes your workload to run fastest.
Lets look at the graphs provided in these benchmarks and see what value is best for MySQL 5.1 and for MySQL 5.0 respectively ?
Both versions do their best with innodb_thread_concurrency=0 and 5.0 is slightly but consistently faster. Same as in my results.
So I would interpret these results differently.
MySQL 5.0 is faster if you configure it right. If you configure it wrong the regression is going to be worse than for MySQL 5.1.
You can’t really use this results to tell MySQL 5.1 will be winner in cases when small values of innodb_thread_concurrency get best performance. The things can be completely different in this case. They may or may not, there is simply no data at all.
It is also very interesting to see benchmark run with innodb_thread_concurrency=1000 - This is exactly the value which you should never use. The limit of 1000 threads inside the kernel is by far too large (so it is same as 0 - unlimited) but it will add another mutex to deal with for the queue implementation.
What would be really interesting to learn though is why MySQL 5.1 gets so better when threads get queued up, what kind of changes in MySQL 5.0 result in this behavior. It also would be good to run profiling for these results to see where these few percent are lost for MySQL 5.0 to see if they are possible to be reclaimed.
Finally - if I would be doing QA, and benchmarks as part of them I would try to use options which are close to what people would use in production. Or at least explain why they are set so. Is it because 5.1 does not show too good results with standard settings or is it just omission ? Again quite possibly nothing will change but may be not.
In particular: innodb_support_xa=0, innodb_doublewrite=0 are not normally used in production and they do add some overhead.
When looking for results more relevant for production I also would keep binary log enabled - most big installations of MySQL use replication or at least binary log to get point in time recovery from backup. Also Innodb log files of 2*650M are larger than practical for most applications because of too large recovery time.
Anyways. It is great to see MySQL QA Team has published some benchmarks now and I can’t wait to see more. If we have data and the good disclosure (settings, versions, hardware) as we have in this case we can make our own mind of results and draw our own conclusions.
Also indeed it is a good time to try MySQL 5.1 for your environment. If you spot any regressions from MySQL 5.0 it will likely take a time to get them fixed.
Entry posted by peter | No comment
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Casey at the Bat
Adapted for Cardboard by Ben Henry Thanks for three great years!
-Ben
Relief Pitcher: Mets front-runners for Takahashi
The Mets are the front-runners to sign Japanese free-agent reliever Ken Takahashi, according to NPB Tracker, the premiere resource for Japanese free agents.
According to the report, Takahashi hopes to sign with a new team by the end of the year.
The 39-year old Takahashi was 8-5 with a 3.50 ERA in 21 games last season for the Hiroshima Toyo Carp.
To check out footage of Takahashi, click play below:
I love visual representations of progress
Rock on, Rakudo dudes.
Groucho, Ghosts, and Getting In
Christina Kahrl did a great job, better than what I can do, in saying what gaining membership to the Baseball Writers Association of America means for Baseball Prospectus in announcing our inclusion on Wednesday. But what does it mean for me and for what I do going forward? That’s the more interesting question.
At first, the answer was ‘nothing’; membership in the organization meant no significant changes. It was, after all, the work I’d done that got me to this place, so why change? I would have more access, being able to go to games in places where the teams haven’t been quite so forward looking about access to press boxes and clubhouses. Access is nice, but it’s not going to change what I write. I do a sourced column about 30 teams, so being in Cincinnati or Chicago, the closest major league cities, isn’t going to give UTK a big bump. If anything, I guess I can plan ahead to a trip to St. Louis this summer.
There will be occasions when my path will fortuitously cross with an injured player, giving me the chance to get a first hand account. Aside from that, I’ll still be doing what I do and just as importantly, not doing what I don’t do.
So far, BBWAA members have been nothing but gracious. They seem as excited about having BP in there as we do about being there. I’m not going to lobby them to use VORP in their stories, but I think they’ll begin to see us not as those snarky guys who write a blog, but people who love baseball and look at it from an analytical, evidence-based mindset whenever possible. The ability to sit down and talk baseball will be an opportunity for us to learn from each other. I can imagine some managers can look forward to some questions they haven’t heard before in press conferences. I hope Ozzie Guillen has read up on his military history.
For me, though, this is much more about meaning than about change. I thought a lot about Doug Pappas on Wednesday after the announcement. He should have been the first with a card saying “Baseball Prospectus” at the bottom. It’s a validation, albeit an unneeded one, for the vision of Gary Huckabay, the behind the scenes work of Clay Davenport, the clarion writing of Joe Sheehan, and many more. It’s a validation of the readers and subscribers, saying that yes, this kind of content from this kind of organization is valid.
There’s one other point that hasn’t been brought up by many, and that is that our inclusion is in large part because this is our job. Christina and I, as well as several others at BP, live and breathe baseball, but we also do this to pay the bills. We saw all too clearly that many in the organization are being visited by the bad economy and the death of newspapers. The BBWAA exists as a trade union for those professional writers, dealing with the issues that face them, such as access to teams, travel, and other business. While many others can make an argument on quality of work, I also believe that one must be a professional writer, one who’s main and indeed only job is that of writing about baseball. (I’ll make a slight exception for other sports, if you’ll allow me to indulge my football gig a bit.)
I don’t doubt for a bit that people out there like Alex Belth, Rich Lederer, or Derek Zumsteg write on par with anyone and far exceed my writing talent, but Alex is an accountant, Rich is in investments, and Derek is a full-time curmudgeon - oh wait, he’s a project manager too. I hope that teams will grant them credentials, but I know that some won’t. I was just in their shoes. Perhaps the inclusion of BP will make teams step back and think next time a net-based writer applies to come to a game. I also hope that more writers like me — especially ones from BP — come up for me to vote “yes” on in coming years.
Most of all, it’s an honor. While others may make the Groucho Marx argument, point to a dinosaur or ten in the membership, or the Edinson Volquez flub as strikes against the BBWAA, I’m proud to stand beside people I considered heroes - Peter Gammons, Ken Rosenthal, Tracy Ringolsby, and Hal McCoy to name but a few - and now they’re colleagues and in some cases, friends. I may not be able to vote for Tim Raines yet, but someday, our votes will be counted alongside others, those who came before us and after us.
Seven years ago, I walked into the Opryland hotel, wide-eyed and not knowing what to expect. I had no real reason to be there, having completed my first season of sending out an email to friends that talked about injuries. My dad talked me into going, I think because he thought I’d get a job. I hoped to meet Peter Gammons, Rob Neyer, and Joe Sheehan. (I still haven’t met Rob …) As I made my first long walk through the lobbies of the Opryland, I happened across Gammons, wearing a suit and New Balance sneakers. He greeted me warmly and I tried to stammer out thanks for helping me by mentioning UTK.
I ran into him in the hallway at the Bellagio. We were both wearing sneakers and we were both members of the BBWAA. Amid the bells and whistles of Vegas, I think I saw Doug Pappas. He was smiling.
Controversy at Le Web? Sacre Bleu!
I had to skip this year's Le Web conference, and I have to say, as much as I enjoyed it last year, on Monday I was so happy not to be jet lagged (again) and cold. (Well, colder than it is in my non-heated house. Brrrrrrr!)
Of course, when I travel to conferences I never get the posh treatment of Michael Arrington, who has apparently picked a fight with Loic about American vs. European entrepreneurs. Loic answers back here. As someone who has gone on four trips to Europe in the last year and has met with hundreds of entrepreneurs, here are my thoughts.
First, Loic is right when he says at the end of the post that this is no longer an interesting or meaningful debate. That said, like it or not, we'll keep having it because of the stark and honest reality that Michael describes:
"...the joy of life is great, but all these two hour lunches over a bottle or two of great wine and general unwillingness to do whatever it takes to compete and win is the reason why all the big public Internet companies are U.S. based. And those European startups that do manage to break through cultural and tax hurdles and find success are quickly gobbled up by those U.S. companies. Skype (acquired by eBay
) and MySQL (acquired by Sun
The crowd jeered but the stark reality of it all is unavoidable. And the fact that the panelists on stage, all either American or living in America, suggested that you can somehow succeed with a startup while maintaining a healthy work-life balance is unfortunate. Too many people choose to be entrepreneurs as a lifestyle, without realizing that it takes everything you have and more to win. And if you aren’t in it to win, why not just take that nice job down the street that gives you five weeks of vacation."
I couldn't agree with Michael more. I think we're going to see entrepreneurship explode globally over the next decade; but as of now, there are very, very, very few examples of startups that have become billion dollar, stand-alone companies that are not at least headquartered in the Valley. So as a result, sharp entrepreneurs around the world who I've met want to know what the Valley does well. And what the Valley does well is tireless work. During several of my book tour stops in the Midwest and the South I was asked if you could have a family and be an entrepreneur. You can. But not if you are trying to build the next Google or Facebook. There is no work life balance at that level. Again, know the game you are playing.
That said, I am not sure what Silicon Valley Loic is living in when he writes this:
"There is a huge difference between being lazy and taking time to know each other. It is one of the main cultural differences I feel everyday as I moved to Silicon Valley: every minute, every coffee, every phone call must have a point. When you call someone in Silicon Valley for anything you will likely get "why are you calling me?" ...
...Don't even think about starting a conversation in Silicon Valley by "how was your week-end" or "how are your kids", they all want you to go straight to the point and no time to lose. I never thought inviting someone I really liked to know better to dinner would get me an email from his assistant "why would you like to invite him to dinner?". I do not think europeans are lazy taking the time to know each other and build deep long term friendships that are not limited to business and I do not think this hurts Europe in any way. On the contrary."
As hard as we all work, this is in no way my experience. Everyday I IM, email or have calls with people that all start out with us chatting about our personal lives. In fact, my favorite conference, the Lobby, is entirely centered around that, which is a big reason most of the attendees bring their families. Several times a week I have long meandering dinners with entrepreneurs and investors where we talk about everything from entrepreneurship to family life to politics to tech and, yes, business. This is why I love living in the Valley. I'm rarely bored in a conversation.
The most extreme example was the research for my book. Incredibly busy entrepreneurs at the most crucial stages of building their companies took hours at a time to talk to me about life and work, repeatedly over more than a year's time. I was never asked what they'd be getting out of it. In fact, a lot of people have asked me why they gave up so much time, and I never have a great answer, because I never once had to have that conversation. So I asked Max Levchin that at the Churchill Club event we did. He looked a little stumped, as though he'd never really thought about it that way either, and said that he just thought telling the whole story of the Internet from the bust through this generation of companies and doing it right was somehow important.
Perhaps Loic just needs new friends in the Valley? ;)
[PHOTOS: Me interviewing Kevin Rose on stage at Le Web last year by Adam Tinworth. Me laughing it up with Le Web's incredibly talented content creator Cathy Brooks after one of those amazing French dinners. Doc Searls took a zillion photos that night of Mr. Lacy and me, Evan and Sara Williams, Jason Calacanis, Jeff Pulver, Pistachio and others chilling in the hotel lobby. If Loic was right...would all those people have flown to Paris just to hang out?]
Bandai poking box
One of the weirdest electronic toy I’ve played with so far is certainly this “tuttuki bako” (tuttuki box) poking box by BANDAI. It consists in a basic box with a LCD screen, a cute yellow button and a hole on one side of the box. To play the games, you simply have to insert your finger in this hole, and see it appear on the LCD screen.
Apart from being a basic clock, you have different games as represented on the photo below: poking a panda, removing boogers from someone’s face, touching slime or ticking a stick figure character. I actually played with it for sometimes yesterday afternoon at the game studio and it sparked a good discussion about this type of gesture-based interactions.
Why do I blog this? this object is the typical geek magnet as you can see from its presence on tons of blogs about gadgets. Oftentimes, they miss the point and only see the odd character as well as the proximity to old-school tamagotchis. Being interested in electronic toys and their user experience (in a video game project), I try to nail down the interesting aspects of this device.
What’s intriguing here is the mode of interaction proposed. Clearly, sticking one’s finger in a hole to interact with an object is highly uncommon and almost taboo. Furthermore, it’s really about being “engaged” in the interaction physically since you feel that a body part is can be both an input and a somewhat output through the LCD screen.
Second, the vocabulary of interaction of highly interesting. On the physical side: insert, touch, twiddle around inside, stick in, etc. And on the digital side: pushing around a stick figure, ticking someone’s nose, petting a tiny panda bear, etc.
Python os.walk() vs ls and find
Since I wasn't able to find a file cataloguer and dupe-finding app that quite fit my needs (for the Mac, DiskTracker was pretty close, I'd definitely recommend that of all the apps I tried), I started to code some stuff up. One of the things I was interested in starting out was how well using Python's
os.walk()(andos.lstat())would perform against ls. I threw in find while I was there. Here are the results for a few hundred-thousand files, the relative speed which was consistent over a few runs:python (44M, 266173 lines) --- real 0m54.003s user 0m18.982s sys 0m19.972s ls (35M, 724416 lines) --- real 0m45.994s user 0m9.316s sys 0m20.204s find (36M, 266174 lines) --- real 1m42.944s user 0m1.434s sys 0m9.416sThe Python code uses the most CPU-time but is still I/O bound and is negligibly slower in real-time than ls. The options I used for ls were -aAlR, which apparently produces output with lots of line breaks, but ends up being smaller than find's single-line, full-path output. The find was really a file-count sanity check (the 1 difference from the Python script is because find lists itself to start with). Using Python's os lib has the advantage of returning all the attributes I need w/o the need for additional parsing, and since the performance is fine, I'll be using that. So, just thought it'd be worth sharing these results for anyone who needs to process a fair number of files (I'll be processing I'm guessing in the ballpark of 2M files (3-4TB of data?) across about a dozen NAS, DAS, and removable drives. Obviously, if you're processing a very large number, you may want a different approach.
December 12, 2008
project management lingo
I lurk on this great email list of project managers called PMClinic; it’s full of smart people who share war stories of (mostly software development) projects. It’s hosted by Scott Berkun (yes, him again) and each week one of the list members posts a challenging project scenario and the non-lurkers chime in with ideas and suggestions.
This week’s starter topic was a bit different though. The subject line was “Is there Project Management Lingo?” and there are about 60 some-odd responses, with people defining the terms they’ve come across; everything from “86’d” to “Whack-a-mole.” I took a few minutes to catalog all the terms (without definitions; I’m not a masochist); here they are[1], in alphabetical order.
- 86’d
- Action required
- All up
- Analysis paralysis
- Arrivadodging
- Baseline
- Bear race
- Blocker
- Boiling the ocean
- Cleaner
- Clue bat
- Clue bus
- Clue by 4
- Coconut shuffle
- Come to Beavis meeting
- Come to Jesus meeting
- Conceptual integrity
- Consistify
- Constant time to completion mode
- Crunch mode
- Dead in the water
- Death march
- Drive
- Eat your own dog food
- Eating the elephant one bite at a time
- Eight days a week
- Engage
- Engagement model
- Enterprise phase
- Fitting ten pounds of crap into a five pound sack
- Gantt flotsam
- Gelled team
- Greenshifting
- Happy status
- Herding cats
- Heroics
- Hit with the scope bat
- I’m going to have to push back on that
- In the weeds
- Keeping you up at night
- Looped in
- Lugubrious
- Mitchy2008
- Mocks
- Nine women can’t have a baby in one month
- Open kimono
- Overcome by events
- Permalancing
- Permanent prototype
- Programmatics
- RACI
- Rat hole
- Ready fire aim
- Red hat period
- Redshirt
- Run up that hill
- Schedule chicken
- Scope
- Scope creep
- Scrub
- Second system effect
- Setup for failure
- Setup for success
- Shovel ready
- Showstopper
- Sign up
- Silver bullet
- Slip
- TEM
- TPS Report
- Then a miracle occurs
- Ticket on the clue train
- Tiger team
- To the right
- Triple D (dollars, date, deliverables)
- Upside risk
- Whack-a-mole
My personal favorites are three of the ones I’d never heard before; compound words that even if they didn’t mean a thing just sound great: consistify, arrivadodging and permalancing.
[1] Note that a few of the items in this list actually came from the comments in Scott Berkun’s similar blog post about the PMClinic thread. Of course, this is not meant to be a full list of every single bit of project management lingo ever uttered by any project manager anywhere. Have one that’s not here? Leave it in the comments.
Visiting Sesame Street
As mentioned, yesterday we found ourselves on Sesame Street, where even the sunny days couldn't sweep the rain clouds away—but Elmo & Co. sure made it all seem a little bit brighter. Speaking of the lil red guy, he had a message for you all:
The series is now filming their 40th season, which will begin airing next November. From Big Bird's doors, to the stoop, to Oscar's garbage can...the set has pretty much remained the same for all those decades, while PBS and the show remain ad-free (check out some of the brands on the shelf at Hooper's). And don't forget: you can make your own muppet now!
We'll be heading back to Sesame soon to ask the muppets some hard-hitting questions, if you have any questions you need answers to—leave them in the comments!
News: Mets trade Scott Schoeneweis to the D’Backs
The Mets have traded Scott Schoeneweis to the D’Backs for RHP Conor Robertson.
The 27–year-old Robertson was 0-1 with a 5.14 ERA in nine games with Arizona this past season.
Robertson is 29-13 with a 2.82 ERA in 217 career-minor league games, during which he struck out 382 batters in 305 innings.
Today's Headlines from Sesame Street
Photo by Jen Carlson/Gothamist.Today we spent some time on Sesame Street (yes, that one), and guess what: there's good news there. The headlines at the newstand included one about a man smiling for 30 days straight (sure, the smile was contagious, but that's a good thing), and a diaper plant being redeveloped into a tv production school (at least it's not a luxury condo). And take a look at that price, just 25 cents—that's half of the cost of the NY Post!
Stay tuned for more on our visit to Sesame Street...
Video of the Day: Subway Circa 1905
This video takes you on an underground ride from 14th Street to 42nd Street. Not that exciting, right? Well it was filmed in 1905. As Andrew Sullivan notes, watch to the 5:00 mark where it gets real good.
Kottke proposes it is running on the contemporary 4/5/6 line, and presents "a 1904 map which shows the then-IRT line in question (in red). At 42nd St, the line runs crosstown to Times Square and then up the 1/2/3."
Basic Question
Does the Treasury Department actually have any authority under TARP to use TARP money to rescue the automakers? Maybe it does, but I'd like to see where it says that. Can someone point me to the language?
Late Update: The GAO thinks so, under an emergency loan provision. As the GAO's acting director testified last week:
First, as it relates to the authorities under the economic stabilization act for the secretary of Treasury, we believe that that legislation is worded broadly enough that would permit the secretary of Treasury to provide the assistance using T.A.R.P. funds. And the secretary has broad discretion to set whatever conditions on the assistance that he would determine necessary.The irony of course is that the Bush Administration has been arguing that TARP is limited to financial institutions, although it looks like they will now be reversing course.
The Simple Truth
On a strictly political calculus, in part because of the highly dysfunctional state of the GOP, those Southern Republican senators simply have no interest at all in being even remotely constructive on the auto bailout.
Big News from Lawrence Lessig
Larry is having some trouble with his blog so I am posting this important news from him on his behalf. - Joi
It is with a complicated mix of excitement and sadness that I make the following announcement.
As some of you remember, just over a year ago I reported that I was shifting my academic (and activist) work from free culture related issues to (what I called) "corruption." At Stanford, a year ago, I outlined what this work would be: To focus on the many institutions in public life that depend upon trust to succeed, but which are jeopardizing that trust through an improper dependence on money. Read the New York Times Editorial of last week. Or think of medical researchers receiving money from drug companies whose drugs they review; legal academics receiving money to provide public policy advice from the very institutions affected by that advice; or Congress filled with Members focused obsessively on how to raise money to secure their (or their party's) tenure. In all these cases, dependency on money in these ways tends to weaken public trust. Or so was my hypothesis when I launched on this project.
But how I would pursue this work has been a constant challenge. I started immediately to devour the books recommended to me by colleagues and on my wiki. I attended conferences and gave talks about the subject. I began a series of interviews with insiders. And with the help of Joe Trippi, I launched Change Congress, which was designed to focus these issues in the context of American politics.
Throughout this process, however, I have felt that the work would require something more. That the project I had described was bigger than a project that I, one academic, could pursue effectively. This wasn't an issue that would be fixed with a book. Or even with five books. It is instead a problem that required a new focus by many people, across disciplines, learning or relearning something important about how trust was built.
About six months ago, I was asked to consider locating this research at a very well established ethics center at Harvard University. Launched more than two decades ago, the Safra Center was first committed to building a program on ethics that would inspire similar programs at universities across the country. But the suggestion was made that after more than two decades of enormous success, it may make sense for the Center to consider focusing at least part of its work on a single problem. No one was certain this made sense, but I was asked to sketch a proposal that wouldn't necessarily displace the current work of the Center, but which would become a primary focus of the Center, and complement its mission.
I did that, mapping a five year project that would draw together scholars from a wide range of disciplines to focus on this increasingly important problem of improper dependence. Harvard liked the proposal. In November, the Provost of Harvard University invited me to become the director of the Safra Center. Last week, I accepted the offer. In the summer, I will begin an appointment at the Harvard Law School, while directing the Safra Center.
This was a very difficult decision to make. Stanford is an extraordinary law school, and I have loved my time here. The students are brilliant, yet balanced. The faculty is brilliant, yet surprisingly humble. The Dean has an amazing vision of the future of legal education, and is redefining the law school in ways that I completely support. I am endlessly proud of the Center for Internet and Society and the Fair Use Project. I have the very best assistant in the world (and she promised at least 5 more years if I stayed). I have written four of my five books while here. I'm almost finished with my 6th, the book I am sure I will be most proud of. This is a place that has given an enormous amount to me, and from which I have benefited greatly.
On a personal level, too, this was a difficult decision. California has become our home. My wife is strongly attached to everything Californian; we both have very close friends here; I hadn't ever imagined raising my kids in anything but the social and political environment of San Francisco. I still find it hard to imagine that I won't, if not now, sometime. And the enormous beauty of the environment here still takes my breath away. A year into my time at Stanford, I was certain I would never leave. After a blissful weekend with my family last week, it still hasn't registered that I will be leaving.
But in the end, it was impossible for me to be committed to the project while turning down this opportunity. It is not just the institution, nor the (partial) freedom from teaching. It is the chance to frame a large-scale project devoted to a large, important and complex problem. Once we saw it like this, my wife and I decided that returning to this old home was the right thing to do. And so in June, we will pack up the car for a cross country trek, back to Harvard.
Of course, I have no objective cause to complain. Harvard too is an extraordinary law school. As anyone who knows me knows, some of my closest friends in the world are at Harvard, including the Dean (or at least until Obama steals them all away). Harvard has grown and changed in wonderful ways over the past eight years. It will be an enormously exciting place to teach and learn.
But I regret deeply doing anything that is hurtful to those I respect and like. Worse, I hate doing anything that can be misunderstood. When Dean Sullivan recruited me, she said Stanford was paradise. I thought that was just a slogan. It isn't. I consider the 8 years I have had here to be the most important and invigorating in my career. And I will miss everything about this place.
Some things won't change. I will continue to work with Joe Trippi to build Change Congress. And I will continue to explore how best to incorporate this space (the Net) into this research. But I will do all of this, and my work, in the context of Harvard's Safra Center and its Law School, and of old friendships, revived.
What You Don't Hear
If the UAW was really the party who blew up the auto bailout negotiations, the people screaming the loudest would be the automakers. Yet, all the noise today is coming from Senate Republicans and their surrogates. What does that tell you?
Do Not Leave Unattended
Awhile back, I was given a journal by my friend, Ari, for a new collaborative notebook project called Do Not Leave Unattended. Jude, the creator of this initiative, sends out notebooks and the recipients get two weeks to fill the next page (or pages), before passing them on. The results so far display a delightful hodge-podge of writing and art. Well, I was really, really remiss and kept my journal for almost two months! I totally suck but Jude understood. Thanks goodness. You can read my scanned entries here.
I did my first entry as a venting process during the weeks before the election. As you can read, I was pretty freaked out about Obama not winning. I am happy it all worked out.
As for the second, it is a saying that I keep posted in my house. Lately it has really resonates for me.
"My left at floods turned upside down"
I pulled up to the house around seven or eight
And I yield to the cabbie your Halsey Smalley later
Look at my kingdom I was finally there
Consider my thrown as the prince of Bel air.(thx, greg)
(link)
The Bourne Infrastructure
"Rather than Bond's private infrastructure expensive of cars and toys, Bourne uses public infrastructure as a superpower. A battered watch and an accurate U-Bahn time-table are all he needs for a perfectly-timed, death-defying evasion of the authorities."
9/11, just like the movies
Just Like the Movies is a short film by Michal Kosakowski that samples footage from movies that were made prior to September 2001 to recreate the events of 9/11. More info.
"It's just like the movies!" was usually the first reaction of those watching the events of 9/11 in New York unfolding on their TV screens, no doubt recalling the endless number of catastrophes that Hollywood has proposed over the years. Now confronted with the reality of one such scenario -- of unprecedented destructive and symbolic resonance -- a feeling of deja vu arises while looking at these images.
Really well done. (thx, christopher)
(link)
Yanks, Mets, Cubs, A’s stadium news
While CC (or as I prefer to think of him, mL) Sabathia was raising eyebrows with the figure $160 million, even larger numbers were being thrown around in the stadium department the last few days:
- The Yankees and Mets put in an official request to New York City for $342 million in new tax-free bonds, to help pay for additional stadium expenses (a new scoreboard and expanded concessions space for the Yanks, while the Mets haven’t itemized their list). The teams are promising to pay off the bonds, so it’s not like the city will be out the whole $342 mil; however, forgoing taxes on the bondholders would cost taxpayers more than $70 million, most of it coming out of the federal treasury. Any Bostonians wishing to express their dismay at being asked to help subsidize the Yanks’ new home with their federal taxes can submit testimony to the New York City Industrial Development Agency before its January 8 hearing on the proposed bonds.
- The long-dormant Cubs plan to sell Wrigley Field to the state of Illinois was back in the news this week, as one of the counts against Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich is that he threatened to withhold approval of the deal unless the Cubs’ parent company fired members of its editorial board who he found distasteful. One day later, it was reported that negotiations on the deal are alive again; in its latest iteration, the complicated transaction would save the Tribune Corp. as much as $200 million in property taxes, capital gains taxes, and bond costs, while the citizens of Illinois would get “I own one-12,831,970th of the Friendly Confines” t-shirts.
- The mostly dead Fremont A’s stadium plan may now be all dead, as the owner of the proposed site came out against putting a stadium there, and an alternative site near the planned Warm Springs train station turns out not to be eligible for subsidized financing. Bud Selig promptly issued a statement that A’s owner Lew Wolff was now free to consider “other communities,” which immediately sparked speculation whether he meant San Jose, until now considered sacrosanct Giants territory. While some have suggested the Nats-O’s detente as a precedent here, the Orioles never actually had territorial rights to D.C., so we’re treading new water here.
All this, and a Simpsons episode about Mr. Burns threatening to destroy a bee sanctuary to build a sports arena. Must be something in the water this week.
Today’s Headlines
- Senate Squashes Detroit Bailout, For Now (NYT, News)
- VMT Down Again in October, Even Though Gas Got Cheaper (AP)
- Ryan Avent: Decline in Driving Signals a Political Shift (Grist)
- Chicago Sells Rights to Its Parking Meter System: $1.16B for 75-Year Deal (WSJ)
- The Dangers Seniors Face on City Streets, Explained (NYT)
- Bx4 Riders Plead for Their Line (News)
- Villager Covers Eighth Avenue Cycle Track
- New South Ferry Station Will Open Next Month (NY1, NYT, News)
- Teenage Victim Describes Car-Touching Incident Turned Violent (News)
- NYC Walk Signals Starting to Look Riddled With Gaps (City Room)
December 11, 2008
Impressive Christian Bale
I watched "The Machinist" tonight, and it's a really good movie, except it freaked me out.
Believe it or not, but Christian Bale played in "Batman Begins" right after "The Machinist", and what he put his body through is really crazy. Compare the following snapshots:
Imdb writes:The producers of the film claim that Christian Bale dropped from about 180 pounds in weight down to about 120 pounds in weight to make this film. They also claim that Bale actually wanted to drop down to 100 pounds, but that they would not let him go below 120 out of fear that his health could be in too much danger if he did. His diet consisted of one can of tuna and an apple per day. His 63-pound weight loss is said to be a record for any actor for a movie role. He regained the weight in time for his role in Batman Begins
"I Am" by Henry
"I Am" by Henry
Originally uploaded by Mike Monteiro.
An Open Secret?
Kwame Raoul, who succeeded President-elect Obama in his state senate seat, is now coming forward to say that he too got the shake-down from Gov. Blagojevich as he sought appoint to the two remaining years of Obama's federal senate term. Raoul says he withdrew his name from further consideration because he was spooked by the governor's ask. But the more interesting part of the article describing Raoul's story in the Times is his suggestion that it was an open secret that Blagojevich was looking for a pay-off of some sort ...
The state senator, Kwame Raoul, who represents the South Side of Chicago, offered few details of his interaction with the governor's office but said he received a call about a month ago confirming that he was under consideration. Soon afterward, however, Mr. Raoul said he ran head-on into another message: that the governor was looking for a candidate who offered something of tangible value to him."It was open knowledge among people in and around Springfield," Mr. Raoul said. "Legislators and lobbyists alike openly talked about the fact that the governor would want to appoint somebody who would benefit him. I can firmly say that I've had these conversations, that I've spoken with both legislators and lobbyists who felt that that would be the consideration in his appointment."
Mr. Raoul would not specifically say what the content of the conversations were, or whom they were with, except that the initial inquiry from the governor's office was made by Victor Roberson, deputy director for intergovernmental affairs. Interest in his candidacy died on both sides, Mr. Raoul said, adding, "Obviously, the perception was that I didn't have anything to give other than my service."
There's a little wiggle room there. There's horse trading and then there's little for some sort of personal pay off. And Raoul's comments are ambiguous as to what was common knowledge. But this does suggest that you not have needed to be the FBI agents listening to the wiretaps to know what was up.
MySQL Binaries Percona build10
We made new binaries for MySQL 5.0.67 build 10 which include next fixes:
- We addressed concerns about potential logging and statistics overhead, so now you can fully turn on / off query statistics for microslow patch and user statistics in runtime.
Next variables were added:
CODE:
With both slow_query_log = OFF and userstat_running = OFF we have no performance penalties of using of patches.
- Also we fixed potential memory leaks in microslow and userstats patches, the leak appeared under some workloads.
The -percona release includes:
CODE:
and -percona-highperf release additionaly includes
CODE:
You can download RPMs for RedHat / CentOS 4.x and 5.x for x86_64, binaries, sources and patches there
OurDelta builds of this should becoming soon.
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Two Images
We're going to need a strong leader to pull us through these times. Hopefully he doesn't fall asleep.
Something Inspiring ... Hopefully
My friend wrote this great blog entry entitled Ten Steps to Creative Success, Holistically! It spoke to me partially because I am filmmaker/writer but also because I am trying to take more time to keep my physical health a priority.
I've accomplished a feat I am proud of: I've lost 50 pounds! It was not easy and it stemmed from my feeling really weak, tired and generally bad about myself. This section in her blog entry really resonated with me:
Recently, I was speaking in Ohio at the College of Wooster and after my keynote I did a Q & A with the students. One of the ladies int he audience asked, how do you do what you do and take care of yourself? I was quiet for a second (which is long for me) but I was thinking to myself as I stood there how utterly tired and just worn I was feeling from all the travel over the past few months which allowed me to cross over seven states by planes, trains and automobiles. How my feet were hurting, and it wasn't just from the past two months...it was had accumulated over the past five years. I had the stomach stress to prove it.
I feel better now that I have in a long time. Still, I have more to accomplish not just with my physical health but in my emotional and creative health.The economy is hitting me in a variety of ways that I don't want to get into here. (Don't worry. I still have my job.) But I am going to have to make some serious sacrifices and, more importantly, going to have to think out the box to help feed myself. One thing I think would be great would be to do #9 on Elisha's list of ten:
Keep a Gratitude Journal. The economy can be crazy for those working and even crazier if your in business for yourself awaiting that next gig, grant or payable. It's easy to be grateful when you feel the abundance. But, if you're an artist that's been in the business for ten years awaiting that great big break, be grateful that you're doing what you love. If you can be in the moment, the universe has a way of allowing what you need to enter. Stay focused on the fact that you want to be a lifelong artist, not a one minute wonder.
I have so many things to be thankful for and though it is a hard road ahead, I have faith that I can make it all work.
Fear of the $100+ Metrocard
Photograph by R. Duke on FlickrWhile lawmakers are split about supporting recommendations to help bail out the MTA, the Independent Budget Office released scary estimates of what unlimited-ride Metrocards might end up costing without a bailout (assuming a 28% across-the-board fare hike):
The IBO's Doug Turetsky explained, "The goal here was to really give people an idea of what fares and tolls could rise to under the plan the MTA put forward." In other words: Scare the bejesus out of you so you tell your lawmakers to help the MTA out! (Find your Assembly member here, find your State Senator here; the MTA faces a $1.2 billion budget deficit next year.)
- For a 30-day card (currently $81): $104 with service cuts ($107 without)
- 14-day card (currently $47): $60 with service cuts ($62 without)
- 7-day card (currently $25): $32 with service cuts ($33 without)
- 1-day card (currently $7.50): $9.50 with service cuts ($10 without)
And, per the IBO estimates, the base fare could be $2.50, but the Daily News reminds us, "The MTA usually doesn't apply flat-rate, across-the-board hikes and that the $2 base fare could be boosted by $1 to $3." The Straphangers Campaign's Gene Russianoff said, "You know, if Albany sits back and says, 'Well, there really isn't a big problem, the MTA doesn't deserve the money,' it's not the MTA that's going to suffer. It's the riders."
Snark
Predictably much of the feedback so far on David Denby's critical book on Snark is snarky, even though few have actually read it (it's out in January). Is that jumping the shark, the snake eating itself, or just plain pathetic?
(link)
Path Forward in a Nutshell
"The manufacturers had to assign the job to the engineers, instead of to the lobbyists."
Those are the words of Steven Chu, Nobel Prize-winning physicist and Obama's nominee to serve as Energy Secretary, quoted by Elizabeth Kolbert in a post on the New Yorker's blog.
The message is to Detroit. But anecdote comes from California's role in setting energy efficiency standards for refrigerators in the 1970s, something the manufacturers said couldn't be done. But when they were forced to do it, they did it -- in spades. Since all this happened, to quote Kolbert, "the size of the average American refrigerator has increased by more than ten per cent, while the price, in inflation-adjusted dollars, has been cut in half. Meanwhile, energy use has dropped by two-thirds."
As Chu says, the key was they took the issue out of the hands of the lobbyists and into the hands of the engineers.
I'm always struck by the way our political culture puts regulations and mandates down as somehow inimical to free enterprise, innovation and ingenuity when in fact, in most cases, quite the opposite is the case. Resistance to efficiency standards like these is almost always born of a lack of confidence in the abilities of our engineers and technology. And the kind of innovations these sorts of regulations require is almost always a boon to economic growth.
If the issue is dictating the inner workings of manufacturing processes, that's one thing. But if it is saying such and such benchmarks must be met by such and such year, that's usually a prod to innovation.
Michael Ruhlman on Butchering a Whole Pig
Michael Ruhlman procured a humanely raised, humanely slaughtered Berkshire pig from a nearby farm and spent the weekend breaking it down and making sausage. It's enough to share among three families, affordable ($1.65/pound), and a lot of work.
Ruhlman goes on to ask,But the actual work of breaking it all down, storing it properly, labeling it, using everything—roasting the bones for stock, curing the bellies and one of the two hams, all the shoulder and trim for sausage and pate, let me tell you, it’s exhausting work and no good on the back. My young cousin Ryan, 6’5” and an athletic 225 pounds easy, put his back out and was forced to suffer through another Browns loss horizontally and sans sausage the day after wrestling with the hog.
Ruhlman updated his post yesterday to respond to the many comments he's received and the answer is, it's probably not that reasonable. "Space, time and knowledge" are the major obstacles for most regular folk. Even so, knowledge at least appears to be a smaller and smaller barrier as pig butchering classes and demos have become more common. Here in New York, The Brooklyn Kitchen regularly hosts pig butchering classes. And Slow Food has sponsored pig butchering demos in New York as well as Boston (and probably elsewhere). What about you, serious eaters? Are you ready to go whole hog? Related: In Videos: The Whole Hog Project How to Butcher a Whole Pig's HeadWho does not have access to hand-raised pigs, or rather, how many people live more than three hours from a farm that raises hogs? I'm betting my mom in West Palm would have a hard time locating a hog she could buy anywhere in her state. But what about Marlies in OK, Carri in AK, Elise in CA? How reasonable is it to ask more people to eat this way?
Gimme Stimulates 3rd Ward
Our Brooklyn crew donated many gallons of coffee for the 3rd Ward Handmade Holiday Craft Fair last week. More than 1000 people turned out to support local artists and the Food Bank for New York.
We were also proud sponsors of 3rd Ward's Open House Art Swap this past Spring when this photo was taken.
Anil and I had a great (but too brief for me) visit with Dave Winer this morning. I promised I'd blog some of the links we discussed - comparing Ebbets Field and Citi Field, the all too wonderful new Putz in the bullpen (as posted on Loge 13, the best of the Mets blogs IMHO), and the debate over whether or not Citi Field will be good for Mets fans.
Interview with comics creator Scott McCloud
We are in the extremely early stages of planning UX Week 2009, our flagship conference on all matters related to user experience design (in fact, we’re so early, we have almost nothing on that page).
A theme for UX Week 2009 is “Looking laterally”, and inviting speakers from fields outside of design who have influenced our work. Someone who has had a huge impact on how I think about design and the creative process is comics creator Scott McCloud, best known for his book Understanding Comics, and more recently for the comic explaining Google Chrome.
Scott will present at UX Week 2009, and he was kind enough to chat with me about comics, visual expression, Edward Tufte, and the importance of believing in the message. You can listen to our conversation on Adaptive Path’s podcast (iTunes, RSS), or download it directly.
Register for UX Week 2009, or any of our upcoming events, by December 31st, and use the promotion code RNSB and you’ll get 15% off the current (discounted) registration price.
If you want to get a sense of UX Week 2009 will be like, peruse the videos from UX Week 2008.
Apple turns next operating system's 3D prowess up to 11
Filed under: OS, Rumors, Odds and ends
Apple, not shy of shaking things up in the interface department, has been sitting on its laurels since the release of OS X earlier this decade. Sure, iPod changed the way we think about music and iPhone has completely turned the mobile phone industry around, but the Mac OS has been relatively static in terms of how users navigate within the environment since the release of 10.0. The good news, however, is that Apple is working on a way to change the way we interact with our systems.
MacRumors has uncovered information on a patent titled "Multi-Dimensional Desktop" which depicts a three-dimensional environment that looks somewhat like viewing a room from one end. The interface has methods for literally stacking files and minimized windows on top of one another as well as for dragging interface items along the multiple surfaces. An interface such as this would be fairly performance-intensive and the ratification of OpenCL along with the impending release of Snow Leopard could be just the shoes that need to drop for this to become a reality. There is no guarantee that this will ever be seen outside of Cupertino or the PTO, but if Apple does implement this interface design it would bring a whole new meaning to the term "wallpaper." Click the read link for an additional image from the patent application.
[Via Engadget]Continue reading Apple turns next operating system's 3D prowess up to 11
TUAWApple turns next operating system's 3D prowess up to 11 originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Thu, 11 Dec 2008 16:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Lessig Blog Dropped from Google
Larry Lessig's blog was infected by gambling spam (as are so many blogs). Google purged him from the index. He fixed it. But it's still not right.
Dinner Tonight: Provencal Fried Egg Soup
I've only had a bit of experience with David Tanis's new cookbook A Platter of Figs—a few recipes are available here on Serious Eats and from excerpts on Amazon.com—but from what I've read, it's really a gem. I was particularly struck by how many of the recipes offer variations, depending on what's available. Not only does it encourage experimentation in the kitchen by suggesting new possibilities, it also respects the seasons, one of the book's central conceits. If a vegetable is not at its peak, why use it? Better to explore a variation.
His fried egg soup is originally a soup of Asian flavors with garlic, ginger, scallions, and bok choy leaves. But he also offers this Provençal version, which replaces the ginger with some sage leaves (which I had languishing in the fridge), uses spinach instead of bok choy, and floats the eggs on toasted bread. It was simple and comforting, a garlicky chicken broth enriched with the runny yolk and woodsy sage leaves.
Provençal Fried Egg Soup
- serves 4 -
Adapted from A Platter of Figs by David Tanis.
Ingredients
4 eggs
3 tablespoons olive oil
Salt and pepper
6 cups chicken stock
2 bunches green garlic shoots or 4 garlic cloves, thinly sliced
Small handful sage leaves
1 1/2 cups thinly sliced or baby spinach
4 slices baguette or other sturdy, European-style loafProcedure
1. Bring the stock to a simmer in a soup pot, then add the garlic and sage. Simmer for about five minutes, then check for seasoning. Salt and pepper as needed.
2. In the meantime, heat the olive oil in a skillet and fry the eggs gently until the white is set but the yolk is still a bit runny. Season generously with salt and pepper. The eggs can be fried ahead of serving.
3. Add the spinach to the broth and simmer for an additional minute. Ladle into shallow bowls, float the baguette pieces, and top each with a fried egg.
Designing the Obama logo
Great two-part video interview with Sol Sender about designing the logo for the Obama campaign. Includes some early design sketches and other designs that made it to the final phase. (via quips)
(link)
San Francisco Mayor to NYC: “Eat Your Heart Out.”
At a groundbreaking ceremony for the long-awaited Transbay Transit Center in San Francisco yesterday, Mayor Gavin Newsom asserted the project will be "so much more extraordinary than Grand Central Station."A rendering of the Transbay Transit Center with a 5.4 acre park on its roof.
Pointing to the renderings on a projection screen behind him, with a 5.4 acre park atop the terminal, 2600 units of housing (with a pledge of 35% affordable homes), the construction of the tallest building in the West, and a terminal expected to serve 100,000 daily riders, Mayor Newsom added: "Eat your heart out, New York City."
If the city manages to find the $2 billion necessary to complete the project, San Francisco's transit hub would be finished in 2014, 101 years after Cornelius Vanderbilt opened the doors to New York's Grand Central Terminal.
The Transbay Transit Center, a public-private partnership headed by the Transbay Joint Powers Authority (TJPA), will replace the existing Transbay Terminal with a multi-modal transportation hub that would serve nine transportation systems in the same complex, including the potential California High Speed Rail route through San Francisco.
Mayor Newsom and several other speakers stressed the economic significance of a large-scale construction project as the overall economy sours and the city makes budget cuts.
Nathaniel Ford, Sr., Chairman of the TJPA and head of MUNI, argued that "without projects like this, we will not be able to provide mobility for the growing population of California, and bring together the fractured public transportation system in San Francisco."
Mayor Gavin Newsom, former Mayor Willie Brown, and board members of the Transbay Joint Powers AuthorityThough the project design is impressive, funding remains a daunting obstacle. As outlined in the excellent feature story by Steve Jones in the San Francisco Bay Guardian yesterday, the TJPA has not found the money to pay for the entire project and may be relying on state funding that won't materialize, especially with California's ballooning budget deficit.
While the TJPA has suggested that it hopes the Transbay Transit Center will catch the eye of President-elect Barack Obama's team, as it expedites construction projects for the fiscal stimulus package early next year, it will be only one of many transit projects competing with the road and bridge lobby, which is already circling the wagons nationally and in California.
"It's exciting to see the first shovel in the soil for the new terminal and there are still real concerns about how we raise the additional $2 billion or so for the project," said Dave Snyder, transportation policy director for San Francisco Planning and Urban Research. "But this is a perfect public works project for the new century."
Below are the various renderings of the proposed terminal as presented by Mayor Newsom and the TJPA at the groundbreaking:
The Natoma Street facade
The center light column from below...
... and above.
The view from Mission SquarePhoto: Matthew Roth
● Scooters
Top: The Jackson 5, Encino, CA, 1970. Photographed by John Olson for Life Magazine.
Bottom: "Bad Route" by Miguel Calderon, 1998. Featured in Wes Anderson's The Royal Tenenbaums.
TPMtv: 2008 Golden Dukes Categories Announced!
The big day has arrived. In today's episode of TPMtv, we're announcing the categories and deadlines for this year's 2nd Annual Golden Duke awards, our prestigious annual awards given out for achievements in corruption, betrayals of the public trust and shameful behavior in general. Check out the categories, get in your nominations and you too could win a prized Golden Dukes T-shirt ...
Full-size video at TPMtv.com.
Exit Sandman
Attention Met fans: here be K-Rod's theme music. Not as intimidating as Metallica. Francisco, lets work on this:
Media That Matters: A Creative Commons Case Study
Watching, reading, quoting, sampling, producing, remixing, commenting on, yelling at, dissecting, dissing... when has media ever not been interactive? Now that we have the platforms to do it publicly and cheaply, we can ease quite naturally from being consumers of media to being creators of media; blurring that divide of creator vs audience and publicly making us - what we have always been - individuals with opinions, reactions and ideas. The laws surrounding this conversation however, can make the whole scene pretty difficult to navigate. There were a couple of recent articles written on MediaRights that tackle this issue. Check them out: Copyleft, "Copyright and Everything in Between" and "Some Rights Reserved." All of our Media That Matters films, for example, are encoded with a Creative Commons license that allows you to copy and distribute the films, as long as you are attributing them to us, and are not selling them or making money off the films. But what does this mean for the filmmakers? Watch our new video on how we at Arts Engine and Media That Matters are working with organizations such as Creative Commons to take this idea of sharing creativity a few steps forward.
We made this video with partner organizations WITNESS and Miro, Big Mouth Films Producer Elizabeth Mandel, our Media That Matters filmmakers from last year's collection America For Dummies and Every Third Bite, and from the fifth annual Bush For Peace. To find out more about how you can submit your film to this year's collection check out our page now. —posted by Leah
'my private sky' dishes by kram/weisshaar
‘my private sky’ by kram/weisshaar for porzellan manufaktur nymphenburg, 2007
‘my private sky’ is a collection of porcelain plates designed by the young duo kram/weisshaar for porzellan
manufaktur nymphenburg. the series is a limited-edition, hand made and hand painted collection of dinner
plates, which feature a pattern of constellations. the design was made possible by a special computer
application the designers created which would transfer the stars on the collection of plates. this pattern is
executed in a way that when placed together the plates form the full night sky.
http://www.kramweisshaar.com
‘my private sky’ by kram/weisshaar for porzellan manufaktur nymphenburg, 2007
‘my private sky’ by kram/weisshaar for porzellan manufaktur nymphenburg, 2007
‘my private sky’ by kram/weisshaar for porzellan manufaktur nymphenburg, 2007
via design you trust
Outfield: Angels may target Raul Ibanez
Jasyon Stark of ESPN.com, and Ken Davidoff at
Newsday, both believe free-agent OF Raul Ibanez may become the Angels top target if Mark Teixeira signs with another team.
However, Davidoff adds, “The Cubs and Phillies seem to have taken the lead in the competition to sign Ibanez.”
Earlier in the week at FoxSports.com, Rosenthal listed the Mets, Angels, Phillies, Braves and Nationals among teams interested in Ibanez.
According to Rosenthal, members of the Mets front office were spotted meeting with Ibanez’s agents at a restaurant inside the Bellagio hotel on Tuesday afternoon.
Speaking of outfielders…
Rosenthal recently reported that the rumored deal between the Brewers and Yankees involving Mike Cameron ‘is not done and may not get done.’
According to Rosenthal, Milwuakee is asking for a second player in addition to Ian Kennedy, whilke the Yankees would like the Brewers to pay a portion of Cameron’s contract.
That said, while Joel Sherman of the New York Post says the chances of a deal are ‘remote,’ the Los Angeles Times reports the deal is done.
Grown Up Digital
The Economist review of "Grown Up Digital" by Don Tapscott contains a nice summary:
Net Geners value freedom and choice in everything they do. They love to customise and personalise. They scrutinise everything. They demand integrity and openness, including when deciding what to buy and where to work. They want entertainment and play in their work and education, as well as their social life. They love to collaborate. They expect everything to happen fast. And they expect constant innovation.
Homeownership Makes You Fat and Unhappy
Grace Wong dived deep into a survey of 809 women in Columbus, Ohio, in 2005 -- before the property bubble burst -- and came up with some startling results:
An interesting portrait of homeowners emerges from my analysis. I find little evidence that homeowners are happier by any of the following definitions: life satisfaction, overall mood, overall feeling, general moment-to-moment emotions (i.e., affect) and affect at home. Several factors might be at work: homeowners derive more pain (but no more joy) from both their home and their neighborhood. They are also more likely to be 12 pounds heavier, report lower health status and poorer sleep quality. They tend to spend less time on active leisure or with friends. The average homeowner reports less joy from love and relationships. She is also less likely to consider herself to enjoy being with people... The results are robust after controlling for reported financial stress.
I've been saying for as long as this blog has existed that homeownership is overrated and that it carries a downside as well as an upside. Today, of course, the biggest downside is the risk of foreclosure. But even absent that risk, buying a house doesn't seem to make people any happier, and in fact homeowners find their home to be more of a source of pain than of pleasure.
For this we make mortgage interest tax deductible, we create monsters like Fannie and Freddie, we run election campaigns promising everybody their own home, we equate homeownership with the American Dream? It's idiotic. I don't expect Americans to all go to Germany and realize how happy people are when they don't need to worry about all the stresses which accompany homeownership. But I do think that substantially all of the upside to homeownership in recent years has been a function of rising house prices. Now that's come to an end, it's hard to see why anybody would want to buy.
In fact, if Americans could be persuaded that rent payments aren't "wasted money" and that owning often makes less financial sense than renting, I think the rate of homeownership might, happily, drop substantially. But it's not going to happen. The ideal of homeownership is deeply embedded in the American psyche, and any datapoints which don't fit into that ideal are automatically discarded.
Related Links
Baby Steps
Brother, Can You Spare $14B?
Corporate Lobbying and the Supbrime Crisis
Google Chrome (BETA)
Since we first released Google Chrome, the development team has been hard at work improving the stability and overall performance of the browser. In just 100 days, we have reached more than 10 million active users around the world (on all seven continents, no less) and released 14 updates to the product. We're excited to announce that with today's fifteenth release we are taking off the "beta" label!
Google Chrome is a better browser today thanks to the many users who sent their feedback and the many more who enabled automatic crash reports, helping us rapidly diagnose and fix issues. Some of the areas where we've made great progress include:
Better stability and performance of plug-ins (particularly video). Video and audio glitches were among the most common bugs fixed during the beta period. If you had problems watching videos with Google Chrome in the past, you should be pleasantly surprised with the performance now.
Even more speed. Google Chrome starts up fast, loads pages quickly, and just keeps getting faster. Since the first beta, the V8 JavaScript engine runs 1.4 times faster on the SunSpider benchmark and 1.5 times faster on the V8 benchmark — and there is more speed to come.
Bookmark manager and privacy controls. We heard you! Better bookmark features were a top request from our users. It's now easier to switch between another browser and Google Chrome with the bookmark import and export features, and we added a new simple way to manage large numbers of bookmarks, too. We also wanted to make it even easier for you to control your browsing data, so all of the features in Google Chrome which affect user privacy are now grouped in one place with detailed explanations for each one.
We've taken security very seriously from the beginning and we will continue to look for ways to make Google Chrome and all browsers even more secure. Google Chrome's unique sandbox technology creates an additional layer of defense against harmful software, while the Safe Browsing feature provides protection against phishing and malware attacks for many browser users.
We have removed the beta label as our goals for stability and performance have been met but our work is far from done. We are working to add some common browser features such as form autofill and RSS support in the near future. We are also developing an extensions platform along with support for Mac and Linux. If you are already using Google Chrome, the update system ensures that you get the latest bug fixes and security patches, so you will get the newest version automatically in the next few days. If you haven't used Google Chrome for a while, now might be a good time to give it another spin.
Download Google Chrome and try it out. Let us know what you think.
Posted by By Sundar Pichai, VP, Product Management, and Linus Upson, Engineering Director
Web Design is 95% Typography
95% of the information on the web is written language. It is only logical to say that a web designer should get good training in the main discipline of shaping written information, in other words: Typography. Excellent article -->Wilson Miner
More on catchers
Recently I wrote that the Red Sox should try to keep Jason Varitek because catcher’s offensive contributions have been steadily in decline. My metric of 20 HR, 75 RBI seasons was (reasonably) questioned by some, so here is a less arbitrary way of looking at it.
Using the basic splits across the major leagues (such as can be found here) I’ve graphed OPS+ contributions by positions as far back as the data goes, to 1956.
Here is the raw data:
So remember that an average major leaguer comes in at 100. A quick look at the above graph reveals things like:
- Overall, there is far less spread among the positions today than there used to be, save for the early 1980s when the spread was also small.
- First baseman have been the bigger contributors, leading baseball almost every year. The difference was huge back prior to the mid-70s, when 1B’s occasionally had OPS+ values as high as 130!!
- Other above-average contributors have been RF, LF, DH, 3B, and CF, with each of those positions being above 100 nearly every single year.
- Centerfielders have been on a continuous decline over the last 50 years. In the late 1950s, they were as highly ranked as 1B and the corner outfielders. By the 1970s, third basemen had caught CFs. In the last 5 years, CFs have now fallen below 3B.
- Catchers, shortstops, and second basemen have been below average nearly all years.
- However, while catchers show a steady decline over this 50-year period, 2Bs and SSs have come closer to the pac, consistently hitting 90 or higher the last bunch of years.
- Finally, and more to the main point of this post, catchers how now fallen to be the least-contributing group in baseball. They have been dead last or tied for last in 7 out of the last 8 years.
There are numerous other interesting things that can be gleaned from the above graph, such as the bumps up in 1998 for 1B and RF when McGwire and Sosa when on their HR-hitting sprees. I encourage you to take a more detailed look at the plot on your own.
For those who’d prefer a simpler view, I offer this 10-year average of the above data. So, for example, the data for 2008 is an average of the values by position for the years 1999 through 2008.
This graph very clearly shows the gradual and continual decline of catchers. They were close to average in the 1960s but have steadily fallen off. By this 10-year average, they’ve actually become the worst group in baseball in the last 2 years.
Accepting the fact that catchers are the least productive hitters, this doesn’t mean that the Red Sox should accept a terrible offensive player at the position. What it does mean, though, is that they are unlikely to be able to find a catcher that is a truly significant contributor, and assuming that Varitek’s value to the pitching staff is real and significant, I feel that they are better off with him than with some other offensively-average catcher.
The Complete Works of Adrian Frutiger: Typographic hotness
Adrian Frutiger - Typefaces. The Complete Works Heidrun Osterer, Philipp Stamm, Schweizerische Stiftung Schrift (Eds.) 462 pp. 430 colour, 620 b/w ills. 24,5 x 31,0 cm, clothbound ISBN 978-3-7643-8581-1 English ISBN 978-3-7643-8582-8 French ISBN 978-3-7643-8576-7 German © Birkhäuser -->FontFeed
Topspin Searching for VP Engineering
Hello,
Yes we’re watching the layoff news and we’re not growing at the pace we once were ourselves, but we do have a few key positions to fill still, including our VP Engineering. If you know someone with VP-level engineering management skills who loves music and would be motivated by building a software toolset to help artists run successful businesses, please have them reach out to us. On the flipside, if you *don’t* have these skills (or skills matching one of the other jobs on our Jobs page), please *don’t* email us. No offense, but we’re very busy building software and would like to keep the signal-to-noise ratio at a manageable level. Thanks!
VP Engineering, Topspin
Topspin is a media technology company helping artists and their partners build successful businesses and brand awareness by providing the software, services and infrastructure through a turn key marketing platform. We create the tools to manage content, connect with fans and generate demand for music while providing deep visibility and analytics that are actionable throughout the system. What ProTools did for music production, Topspin is dedicated to doing for music marketing.
You can read more about our company on our blog, in this Billboard article, and get a bit of a sense of what we stand for in this TechCrunch article. Our chairman and co-founder is ProTools-founder Peter Gotcher and we are backed financially by Redpoint and Foundry Group. I am the CEO and my background includes a stint at Nullsoft and Grand Royal, as well as the GM of Yahoo! Music.
We are currently on the hunt for an inspired and experienced VP of Engineering to lead the majority of our employees, our incredibly talented engineering team of twenty-five. The right candidate is a former VP of Engineering with a history of passionate leadership, knowledge of engineering process and a track record of delivering robust software against aggressive timelines. They have experience building simple, elegant and powerful Web applications as well as possessing a passion for music, either as a performer or a fan.
Experience in ecommerce, CRM, digital media delivery, analytics, scalable services and/or marketing based systems is desirable. Responsibilities include the management and oversight of the developers, network operations/IT, data services, QA and program managers in a 24×7x365 high availability environment. Technologies include RoR, MySQL, Java and python.
If this describes you, please reach out to us ASAP.
Cooking from Thomas Keller's 'Under Pressure'
"We spent roughly seven and a half hours re-creating two recipes."
Grilled Octopus Tentacles, Chorizo, Fingerling Potatoes, Marcona Almonds, and Salsa Verde.
Over the weekend, my good-humored boyfriend, Al, and I tackled two recipes from Thomas Keller's latest cookbook, Under Pressure.
This handsome book is an ode to sous vide cooking and offers instruction for its use. The book is the third collaborative effort by Keller and Michael Ruhlman, following the French Laundry and Bouchon cookbooks. We've had the pleasure of cooking through the earlier volumes and met the arrival of this new book with anticipation.
Two years ago, Al bought a laboratory-grade immersion circulator off of eBay (which he adequately sterilized, he swears). Since then, we’ve managed to clutter the kitchen with additional hardware like a more-portable immersion circulator, a FoodSaver vacuum sealer, a Vita Prep high-speed blender, three kinds of chinois, a Superbag, an electronic pressure cooker, a heat gun, an NO2 canister, a meat grinder, a meat slicer, a dehydrator, and a microgram scale. Then there’s “software” like xanthan gum, Versawhip, methocel, tapioca maltodextrin, sodium alginate/calcium gluconolactate, agar, and lecithin. We've grown progressively comfortable with technical, precise cooking.
In particular, we've fallen in love with sous vide. Truthfully, I'm a late convert to the Cult of Meat, but our sous vide preparations have made me a born-again flesheater with missionary zeal. Meat is rarely as juicy or as velveteen as it is slow-poached in a controlled bath of 55.5°C. (I confess; I also get a special thrill witnessing my doctor’s horror as my LDL-levels climb to all-time highs.)
Before the advent of Under Pressure, home-chefs undertaking the challenge of sous vide looked to information from a handful of pioneering amateurs such as Nathan Mhyrvold or Douglas Baldwin. Though their calculus is far from sexy, used as a reference, their experiments established clear and helpful guidelines for further experimentation at home.
Contrast that with Under Pressure. The book has been heralded as the definitive guide to sous vide cooking, which may be true by circumstance more than intent.
Under Pressure, as it so states, is a literal documentation of recipes found in French Laundry and Per Se, written by professional chefs for professional chefs, presuming access to professional-grade equipment. This statement is buried inconspicuously on page 38 and more forbiddingly intones: “No modifications have been made to accommodate cooks preparing [these recipes] at home.”
Fueled on defiance, Al and I were ready for the challenge. Even without the required $4,000 chamber vacuum, we would conquer all. We selected two recipes that seemed intrguing and complimentary: Grilled Octopus Tentacles, Chorizo, Fingerling Potatoes, Green Almonds, and Salsa Verde and Caramelized Fennel, Marcona Almonds, Navel Orange Confit, Caraway Seeds, and Fennel Purée.
We began cooking at 3:30 p.m. Saturday, sitting down to "dinner" 1:30 a.m. Sunday. Excluding trips to Whole Foods and Wegmans to find a "1.15 kilogram Mediterranean or Japanese octopus," we spent roughly seven and a half hours re-creating two recipes.
The meal, though tasty, wasn’t anywhere near seven hours' worth of tasty.
Caramelized Fennel, Marcona Almonds, Navel Orange Confit, Caraway Seeds, and Fennel Puree.
General Observations of the Book
1. The biggest challenge in cooking from Under Pressure is that its recipes resist compromise and restrict substitution. The techniques and choices are not always appropriate outside of the restaurant kitchen, and more problematically, choices are not fully explained. The type of curious cook who would even consider the investment of a chamber vacuum is sure to wonder about the rationale behind preferred cooking times and temperatures.
2. Keller's recipes don't scale well for home-cooking and we direct this criticism specifically toward its sauces and purées. The effort toasting, grinding, rinsing, draining, chopping, blending, straining, and re-straining yields so little reward. All this effort for a 200-gram mash.
3. The gauzy macros, shot axonometrically, do little to clear the mystery of how to plate a dish. This would be a minor quibble with most cookbooks, but is a major one with Under Presssure. Photographs depicting the proportions of the many components of a recipe would be helpful. But the book's food porn, lush as it is, is more useful as inspiration than illustration.
4. The book is written with exacting detail but is sometimes not specific at all. Though we were instructed on how much cumin seed to use, down to the Nth milligram, we were given no indication whether the plated dish was to be served hot, cold, or whenever we got around to eating it. In general, the recipes also fail to define the desired volume or thickness of ingredients, which is particularly important for sous vide.
5. Though the recipes are not written or laid out with the same modularity as they are in the similarly beautiful Alinea cookbook, it does appear possible to break down a recipe by its components and tackle them at will. Grilled Octopus Tentacles, Chorizo, Fingerling Potatoes, Green Almonds, and Salsa Verde is not a recipe we’ll undertake in its entirety again, but we’ll certainly use sous vide to tenderize octopus in the future. Some Keller preparations are sensible undertakings. Combined with certain shortcuts, they can yield equally delicious results.
6. There is a danger in cooking a Keller recipe by cherry-picked components, however. Keller’s components are often overcharacterized by a single flavor. The component may seem overpowering eaten on its own but is balanced when the dish is eaten as a whole. As an example, the fingerling potatoes eaten alone tasted terribly medicinal. They were dominated by the taste of bay leaf. But after the plate was assembled, and after we took care to spear each forkful with potato, chorizo, octopus, almond, and a wet swab of purée, we finally understood what we were meant to taste—the nano version of four Spanish tapas.
What Keller and Ruhlman have really done is document recipes from the recent French Laundry–Per Se corpus. As a French Laundry II or a Per Se Paint-by-Numbers, the book succeeds. There is pleasure in reading, cooking, and eating from it. However, as a practical guide to sous vide cookery, Under Pressure doesn't quite meet the mark. It struggles to generalize the specifics of the recipes into broad sous vide principles. Moreover, the reader is easily lost in the minutiae of its preparations.
Heath Ledger, Brangelina Nominated For Golden Globes
The Golden Globes will, once again, be a crazy, star-studded event this year, as some of Hollywood's biggest big-wigs have been nominated.
Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie both scored Globe nods; Angie for Best Actress in Changeling and her man for Best Actor in his newest flick, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. Angie's going up against Anne Hathaway for her role in Rachel Getting Married and, though I haven't seen either flick, I have to pull for Anne because she drinks and does karaoke. Just like me.
As expected, the dearly-departed Heath Ledger was recognized for his wickedly wonderful portrayal of the Joker in this summer's The Dark Knight. His family released a statement to People.com after hearing the news:
"We thank the Hollywood Foreign Press Association for honoring Heath's performance in The Dark Knight. This nomination is deeply appreciated and is not lost on those of us who continue to love and miss him. We are so proud our boy's work is being recognized in this way."
Get your tissues ready for when Heath's name is called on Jan. 11. It's going to be tough to watch.
Get the full list of the nominees from our friends at iVillage's Movie Insider.
Not Another "-Gate"
TPM Reader DG:
This morning, one of the remaining Chicago newspapers headlined the current doings as Blago-Gate. Now, this nickname shows no originality. Surely, you and your readers can come up with something more scandalicious. I throw down the virtual gauntlet.Late Update: Left holding the Blag? -- jmm.
City Council Proposes Slashing Funds for Bike Network
City Council Speaker Christine Quinn and her city-owned Chevy Suburban. Photo copyright Steven Hirsch.
New bike infrastructure in New York City could be on the chopping block as the City Council and Mayor Bloomberg revise spending projections downward. On Sunday, Speaker Christine Quinn and the City Council released $495 million in proposed budget cuts over the next two years, including an item that would slash spending on bike network expansion in half. DOT's bike network funds would drop from $9.6 million to $4.8 million in 2009, and from $11 million to $5.5 million in 2010. Download this PDF and scroll down to the first item numbered 841, "Reduce Bike Network Development Funding."
A spokesman for Speaker Quinn's office did not specify why the bike network was targeted for spending cuts, saying only that painful steps were necessary to close the city's budget gap. In an interview on WNYC earlier this week, Quinn said that the council's financial staff were charged with identifying programs that are "not necessarily the core function" of city agencies.
The proposals now enter the ongoing budget negotiation process between the council and the mayor's office. In November, Bloomberg released a separate list of budget fixes, which did not include cuts to bike network funding. (Interestingly, the mayor's proposals did include a measure to raise more revenue from parking meters below 60th Street [PDF, page 24].) Yesterday Bloomberg ordered city agencies to identify additional spending reductions by December 22.
If you believe a safer bike network is a core function of DOT, contact information for Speaker Quinn's office and your council member can be found on the City Council website.
New York iPhone Boot Camp gets off to respectable start
We caught word in October of a New York iPhone workshop that smelled like vaporware. Now nearly two months later, the even organizer has straightened things out, the first event successfully launched without a hitch, and more are on the way.
Outfield: Julio Lugo for Byrnes being Discussed
Steve Phillips of ESPN.com believes the Red Sox and D’Backs are discussing a deal that could send Julio Lugo to Arizona in exchange for OF Eric Byrnes.
Byrnes is due to earn $22 million over the next two seasons, while Lugo will earn $18 million during the same time span.
…i’m thinking it, and so are you…so, here you go:
In a report from early October in the New York Post, Joel Sherman wrote, ‘The D’Backs considered Byrnes for Luis Castillo, but determined they just don’t like Castillo at all.’
…i’m sure Mets fans understand the sentiment…
Speaking of outfielders…
The deal between the Rockies and Nationals involving Wily Taraves is falling apart, for more go to MLB Trade Rumors.
The agent for Bobby Abreu met with the Rays, who met earlier in the week with Milton Bradley, reports MLB.com.
The Chicago Sun Times and the Chicago Tribune both believe Bradley is a top target of the Cubs.
1905 subway ride
Here's a video from 1905 of a NYC subway car going from 14th Street to 42nd Street. It's funny to see all the men in suits and hats running for the train...it takes some of the formality out what seems from photographs to be a more dignified time. Also, anyone know what line/train this is?
Update: The inbox consensus seems clustered around the opinion that this train is running on the contemporary 4/5/6 line. Here's a 1904 map which shows the then-IRT line in question (in red). At 42nd St, the line runs crosstown to Times Square and then up the 1/2/3. (thx jason et al.)
(link)
What A Putz!
Yes it is an obvious headline but I had to use it at least once.
The Aaron Heilman era has ended. After signing K-Rod yesterday, the Mets pulled off an overnight 3-team trade with the Mariners and Indians. Bottom line, the Mets got:
JJ Putz
Right handed reliever Sean Green (no, not Shawn Green)
Outfielder Jeremy Reed
And gave up
Aaron Heilman
Joe Smith
Endy Chavez
Minor League first baseman Mike Carp
Right-handed pitcher Maikel Cleto
Outfielder Ezequiel Carrera
Left-handed pitcher Jason Vargas
The only one that hurts is Smith. He had alot of potential and showed poise and durability for such a young guy. We may regret that move one day.
Chavez, not so much. He is known for a great play in an ultimately meaningless game. Loge13 is frankly tired of hearing Met fans speak of that catch with such ebullience. As a player, I liked Chavez alot but he had become almost totemistic. Manuel clearly did not like him much, as judged by his decreased playing time last year.
We sure gave up alot of players. Putz has already said he'd rather be a closer but will adjust to the role. Meanwhile, the other two guys don't exactly come with sterling credentials:In addition to Putz, the Mets added Green, 29, to their relief corps, cushioning the loss of Smith. Green, like Smith, has proven to be a vastly better pitcher against right-handed batters, and he could step into a late-inning role with the Mets. Green excelled during the first half of 2008, before posting an 8.65 ERA in 24 games after the All-Star break. He has made a combined 136 appearances for the Mariners over the past two seasons.
Reed, 27, is a former top prospect who hasn't hit with any consistency in the big leagues since batting .397 over 58 at-bats in his rookie season. Once the Mariners' starting center fielder, Reed spent much of last season at Triple-A Tacoma, producing a .269 average in 97 games with Seattle.
I am a bit baffled that we gave up seven players (four of whom with major league experience) for this crew. But if Putz can reclaim the 8th inning for Mets fans in the names of all things Cook and Turk, then Loge13 welcomes Putz.
Typographic Gifts for Designers, Part 12
I liked samplers as a kid. In the fictional account of my life, I could trace this affection to my dear great-grandmother Abigail, who spent hours embroidering by candlelight (when she wasn’t busy repairing uniforms for returning Union soldiers.) But having grown up in New York in the seventies, it’s more likely that I first noticed the style while watching Family Feud, and that a steady diet of Atari 2600 and NAMCO simply predisposed my developing brain to a sympathy for bitmaps.
Etsy is carrying a charming little bag that pays homage to the cross-stitch, a gusseted Canvas Tote silkscreened in orange or blue. At 11" x 14" (30cm x 35cm) it’s big enough for the usual junk that designers lug around, and is of course a sound alternative to grocery store plastic, whether you’re ecologically responsible or just self-righteous. Either way, be stylish. —JH
Sampler Tote at Etsy, $24.00.
December 10, 2008
Relief Pitcher: Mets in Serious Talks for Putz
Update, 9:20 PM:
Ken Rosenthal at FoxSports believes Mariners closer J.J. Putz could be headed to the Mets in a three-team trade with the Indians.
According to Rosenthal, “Aaron Heilman, Endy Chavez and Mike Carp would be in the deal, as would Indians OF Franklin Gutierrez.”
MLB Trade Rumors points out that Rosenthal’s original post described the Mets as ‘close to acquiring Putz,’ but has since been updated to read, ‘working on acquiring Putz.’
Original, 8:59 PM:
In a report for the Star-Ledger, in-the-know Dan Graziano reports the Mets and Mariners are in ‘serious discussions’ on a trade that could send J.J. Putz to New York in exchange for RHP Aaron Heilman and minor-league 1B Mike Carp.
Earlier tonight, on SNY’s Mets Hot Stove, SI.com’s Jon Heyman mentioned Omar Minaya’s continued interest in Putz, despite signing Francisco Rodriguez, noting that Seattle’s closer could be used as a set-up man, which would be an unrealistic request for a pitcher like Brian Fuentes.
…wow, ‘now we’re cooking with gas,’ as Adam T. Intern used to say…i mean, this would be a tremendous deal in my book…
…prior to the K-Rod signing, i talked with a variety of scouts and people in baseball who believe putz has some of the best ‘stuff’ of any relief pitcher in baseball, so to slot him in to the eighth inning, for heilman and a minor-leaguer, who most believe is a DH in waiting, would be strong…
…in other words, i hope this happens…fingers crossed…
In 47 games for the Mariners in 2008, during which he was on the disabled list twice, once with a hyperextended right elbow, Putz was 6–5 with a 3.88 ERA with 15 saves in 23 opportunities.
The 31–year-old Putz had a 1.88 ERA in 2007 with 40 saves, and a 2.30 ERA in 2006 with 36 saves.
He will earn $9.5 million next season, after which the team can exercise a $8.6 million option for 2010, or make him a free agent.
Speaking of relief pitchers…
Ken Rosenthal at FoxSports.com believes Brian Fuentes will eventually get a three-year, $33 million deal.
Cardinals manager Tony La Russa told reporters in Las Vegas that Fuentes is his team’s top priority, according to MLB.com.
MySQL 5.1 went to GA. Was it a good move ?
MySQL 5.1 release as “GA” seems to be the most controversial to date. It had very negative response from Monty, original MySQL Founder and controversial responses in community including another beating by Kevin Burton.
There is also very interesting reading on MySQL 5.1 open bugs
So how do I take it and where do I think MySQL 5.1 Quality Stands ?
I’ve been MySQL user for years since version 3.22 and when MySQL 3.23 came out we were using it in production since 3.23.3 or so, when it was in the Alpha stage still. A lot of bugs were fixed after we started using it… we just made sure the bugs which are important for us are fixed. Later while working for MySQL I’ve seen big and famous companies shipping MySQL 4.1 beta build into their hardware solutions. This is to tell stability and amount of bugs is not about number but about the things which affect you.
So when people are writing hey, MySQL 5.1 works for them I do not think this has anything to do with MySQL 5.1 stability. I know people who are happy with MySQL 6.0 and Falcon stability for months now - it works for their workload.
So what is Quality Guidelines for Release (GA) when ? The current policies are here but a history of how they evolved over time is much more interesting and allows to much better understand why Monty is upset with release.
MySQL Release Quality Guildines devaluated during last years probably worse than dollar in the last century. In early days it was “no known bugs in release” when it changed to “no known bugs in production release” when it changed to “no crashing bugs in production release” and now it changed to be to “believed to be reliable, free of serious bugs”. I believe this is already below the standards of what qualities “GA” release should have.
But guess what? MySQL 5.1 did not really meet even these guidelines when it was released as GA. Check bugs Monty mentions and even official MySQL 5.1 bug list. These are number of bugs which I would consider serious which are not fixed in 5.1.30. But who cares about me ? “serious” is not well defined term and you can pick whatever you like to call serious.
On the bright side MySQL 5.1 “GA” quality was much better than MySQL 5.0 quality when it was released.
Though the question remains, was MySQL 5.1 release as GA now a good move ?
MySQL 5.1 spent in RC stage well too long so people already started to use it in production (because they started with 5.1RC during their development) without clear understanding how it is going to be supported from MySQL. It also needed more Community Testing to fix those rare bugs which only become found with very wide use. Finally it was helpful for corporate users who are stuck with 5.0 because of policies of using only “GA” versions of the product.
Here is actually there another challenge comes from - MySQL does not make a difference between which release is recommended (offered by default for download) supported and later GA release.
Decoupling these terms would allow to get users to the Recommended release, which is also supported while have still high and clear GA guidelines which could be met months after release is getting Recommended status.
Though in this case MySQL of course minds its commercial interests more than follows community sentiments - in commercial software market there is usually no such difference. So it is complex to make people to understand and sell. Plus people assume first GA release is crap anyway. I’ve seen a lot of policies like waiting at least 3 minor releases or waiting 6 months after release people use for Commercial databases this gets transfered to MySQL too.
As a Summary I think this was inevitable MySQL 5.1 will be released for commercial/marketing reasons, not because it really meets quality guidelines. At the same time I would like to send my warm congratulations to MySQL 5.1 development team which made this release better quality than MySQL 5.0 initial release.
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Happy birthday, mouse!
Filed under: Hardware, Apple History
It was 40 years ago this week that Douglas Engelbart gave the first public demonstration of what would become the modern computer mouse, affectionately called "The mother of all demos." With that in mind, we've decided to take a look at the evolution of the Apple Mouse.
The current version is the Mighty Mouse, of course. With its scroll wheel and touch sensitive clicking surfaces, it's loved by some and despised by others. I'll admit that a wired Mighty Mouse is my main mouse, which will undoubtedly make some of you gasp. Still, we can't fully appreciate the Mighty Mouse without acknowledging its predecessors.
When you think of old Apple mice, you probably think of the ADB (Apple Desktop Bus) variety. But even those were preceded by the DB-9 connector mice that shipped with the Apple Lisa. In fact, those were the first commercially available mice. They were clunky, square-ish affairs that featured a single button -- a design decision that Apple has refused to abandon all these years (yes, the Mighty Mouse isn't a single-button mouse, but certainly looks it from an overhead perspective).
The boxy shape was kept largely intact until 1993, when Apple released the Apple Desktop Bus Mouse II. I can remember using one of these with a Performa and being amazed by it. "it's not square! It fits in my hand! This is incredible!"
Also "incredible" was the amount of time I spent removing the ball and scraping the gunk off of the rollers.
The design stayed pretty much the same until the "hockey puck" was released with the iMac in 1998. Apple's first USB mouse, the hockey puck divided the Mac community. Some declared it the best thing since copy and paste. Others, like me, considered it an abomination.
Just two years later, Apple got the message, retired the hockey puck and introduced the Pro Mouse. The lozenge-shaped device was the immediate predecessor to the Mighty Mouse we all know and love (or despise) today.
There are Apple mouse fanboys, and those who'd never touch one. In fact, even your favorite TUAW bloggers are divided. Below is a gallery of our favorite and current mice, plus a few vintage examples. Finally, we threw in a few alternate input devices as well.TUAWHappy birthday, mouse! originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Wed, 10 Dec 2008 20:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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hp labs on twitter
The HP Labs report on Twitter is worth reading in full...and not just for backing into an active user number. I found this graf particularly noteworthy: "These initial observations suggest a systematic investigation into the nature of the social networks that actually matter to people. By networks that matter we mean those networks that are made out of the pattern of interactions that people have with their friends or acquaintances, rather than constructed from a list of all the contacts they may decide to declare." Here's to more systematic investigations.
diller scofidio + renfro to renovate lincoln center
image courtesy diller scofidio + renfro with beyer blinder belle
new york’s lincoln center will celebrate its 50th anniversary in 2009. to celebrate, the institution will be getting
a major overhaul by the architects of diller scofidio + renfro as well as tod williams billie tsien. the arts and
culture center will get renovations to its mid-century building’s by the likes of johnson and saarinen.
learning from the past, diller scofidio + renfro hope to renew the building’s status and improve its function
as a public place. the center is already getting a new visitors center designed by tod williams billie tsien
that is set to open next year. diller scofidio + renfro will focus on small changes that include a sunken
service road and improved lighting in the center’s courtyard.
http://www.dillerscofidio.com
more
diller & scofidio: the blur building
image courtesy diller scofidio + renfro with beyer blinder belle
image courtesy diller scofidio + renfro with beyer blinder belle
image courtesy diller scofidio + renfro with beyer blinder belle
image courtesy diller scofidio + renfro with beyer blinder belle
image courtesy diller scofidio + renfro with beyer blinder belle
via architectural record
A WordPress 2.7 Upgrade Guide (Really!)
Back when WordPress 2.5 came out earlier this year, we wrote a cheeky post called "A WordPress 2.5 Upgrade Guide" which pointed out some of the areas where we think our Movable Type platform offered a good option for people who wanted to consider alternatives to WordPress.
But today, WordPress 2.7 is out, and any day a great new upgrade for a blogging platform is released is a day that's good for all bloggers and for the web. So, to celebrate the release of WordPress 2.7, we've put together a list of resources that show how we at Six Apart are committed to helping all bloggers, regardless of platform. Here's a quick list of how Six Apart can help WordPress bloggers. Most of these services are powered by our completely reinvented TypePad infrastructure. And as you'd expect, all of these options are either free or open source or both.
TypePad AntiSpam: TypePad AntiSpam is like Akismet in that it blocks junk comments on your site. But TypePad AntiSpam is different because it's built on an open source engine, it's free (no matter how you use it) and our users tell us it has fewer false positives, while still being 100% compatible with the Akismet API. We've even got a WordPress plugin that makes connecting to the service a snap, and some great giant WordPress-powered sites like Techcrunch have seen great results with it.
- Six Apart Media Advertising: Want to try actually making money with your blog? We've got over a thousand bloggers in the Six Apart Media advertising program already, with many of their sites powered by WordPress. Both our bloggers and our advertisers tell us they love working with a partner that really understands blogging. (If you're on WordPress.com and can't run your own ads, we can help you get set up with a blog where you can.)
TypePad Connect: This free service just launched in beta and easily connects to any WordPress.org blog to offer really powerful commenting and beautiful, customizable commenter profiles on your site. Naturally, since OpenID was born at Six Apart, TypePad Connect and these cool new TypePad profiles have OpenID baked in, too. (WordPress.com users can't install a service like TypePad Connect yet, but perhaps you can suggest the idea and hopefully it'll be added.) If you want, you can just get your free TypePad profile and use it to track your comments or to provide links to your other accounts — this replaces the old TypeKey system that you might remember.
- Blog It: This great, free application powered by TypePad lets you easily update multiple blogs and services from an Apple iPhone or right within Facebook. With one click, you can post to blogs on WordPress.com, WordPress.org, Movable Type, TypePad, Blogger and most other blogs, while also updating your status on Facebook, FriendFeed or Twitter. Write once, and publish anywhere.
- Blog Link: In an economy like the one we're facing today, even our blogs need to play a role in helping out our careers. We make that easy with our new, free LinkedIn application Blog Link, powered by TypePad. Blog Link automatically displays headlines from any blog you use (whether it's on WordPress, TypePad, Blogger, Movable Type or anything else) right on your LinkedIn profile. Now the ideas you publish on your blog can be part of what your employers or partners see when they check you out on LinkedIn.
All of these services and tools are just the beginning of what we're already offering to millions of bloggers around the world, regardless of which platform you use to publish your blog. For example, our Six Apart Services team has built some of the biggest social media sites in the world, including ones powered by WordPress, though of course we think they're the best Movable Type and TypePad development teams in the world.
Blogging and the future of the social web is bigger than any one platform or any one company, and that's why we've always offered different platforms for different audiences, and worked hard to be a good resource to all bloggers. So we offer our congratulations to the whole WordPress community on an exciting launch, and especially to the many WordPress bloggers who are Six Apart customers as well.
There are, of course, official docs available if you're looking for help upgrading your WordPress install, and we strongly recommend it as it's important to stay up to date in order to keep your site secure. And finally, while we're of course proud first and foremost of the tremendous effort with put into Movable Type, TypePad and Vox, we do sincerely hope our roster of services offer a nice set of upgrades to make this new version of WordPress even better. Let us know what you think.
Photo of the Day: Brussels Sprout Xmas Tree
Tired of traditional Christmas trees? Try a Brussel's sprouts Christmas tree this season: It looks pretty and has the potential to taste good. [via The Kitchn]
Related
Dinner Tonight: Dan Barber's Brussels Sprouts
Golden-Crusted Brussels Sprouts
Essentials: Roasted Brussels Sprouts
The age of mass intelligence
Dumbing down? Perhaps not -- it's the age of mass intelligence.
(link)Millions more people are going to museums, literary festivals and operas; millions more watch demanding television programmes or download serious-minded podcasts. Not all these activities count as mind-stretching, of course. Some are downright fluffy. But, says Donna Renney, the chief executive of the Cheltenham Festivals, audiences increasingly want "the buzz you get from working that little bit harder". This is a dramatic yet often unrecognised development. "When people talk and write about culture," says Ira Glass, the creator of the riveting public-radio show "This American Life", "it's apocalyptic. We tell ourselves that everything is in bad shape. But the opposite is true. There's an abundance of really interesting things going on all around us."
Yahoo! Brickhouse closes - People get upset - I think it’s okay
Among the announcements coming from Yahoo! today is the close of Brickhouse, the “new product development” incubator set up two years ago. Reading tweets and notes in the blogosphere, a lot of folks are upset, thinking this is a foolish decision.
I think it makes perfect sense, and I’m surprised they hadn’t done it sooner.
Brickhouse essentially served as Yahoo!’s research and development arm. The thing is, stuff in Brickhouse rarely, if ever, made any impact anywhere else in Yahoo! Over four years ago, I wrote about the folly of r&d groups, and it still holds.
I’ve always been suspicious of the value of Brickhouse. From the outset, it seemed to be where Yahoo!’s most talented designers and developers went in order to avoid working on anything with accountability — and Yahoo! let them, because they didn’t want to lose that talent. The same thing happened to Yahoo!’s Design group back in February — when it became clear they were delivering no value to the business, they were let go.
So, unlike many of my friends and colleagues, I have trouble shedding tears over the demise of Brickhouse. It was apparent for a very long time that most of the efforts within Brickhouse were not delivering value, and it seemed as if the majority of folks within Brickhouse were perfectly fine with that. We have to accept the consequences of our decisions, and if we decide to work in an organization that has no demonstrable connection to value, we have to be prepared to be the first with our backs against the wall when hard times come.
Andy wrote that Yahoo!’s management “would be better served firing themselves,” but that’s true only to the extent that management should have never let the playground that was Brickhouse exist in the first place. Those who were in the Brickhouse should consider them lucky to have been able to play for 2 years while their colleagues turned the cranks that kept revenue coming in.
(this was dashed off in haste, and I’m sure it’s missing much nuance.)
How Jay Leno is Contributing to Our Awful Economy
On Monday, NBC Universal chief executive Jeff Zucker told weary investors at an industry conference that the network was determined to cut costs. His comments came as the company laid off 500 employees and annnounced it would move Jay Leno to its 10 pm weekday time slot. This makes sense for NBC: Every hour of scripted programming costs about $5 million -- for fleets of writers, directors, cinematographers, actors, editors, and everyone in between. Leno's compensation is hefty but not nearly $5 million an hour, and his live show costs a fraction of that. (Big-name stars come to hawk their latest films and books for free.) The Wall Street Journal estimates the move will save NBC as much as $25 million a week, minus Leno's larger takehome pay.
It's happening all over the economy now. Star players are being moved to where they can do the work of many others, who are being laid off in large numbers. The stars earn more yet the companies save big because they decimate payrolls. It's done to improve profits and thereby calm anxious shareholders.
Somehow, though, it's not working. Shareholders are still anxious -- and becoming ever more so. Why? Because all the payroll cuts, multiplied across the economy, are reducing the capacity of consumers to buy goods and services. Which is why advertising budgets are being slashed. And with less advertising, NBC's profits will continue to plummet even as it cuts its costs.
What's rational for an individual company and wonderful for its star players turns out to be irrational for the economy as a whole. It's not Jeff Zucker's fault or any other executive armed with an axe. But this does suggest why smart government policies are critically important, especially now, and why a very large stimulus package is in the interest of everyone -- including Jeff Zucker and Jay Leno.
Reid To Blago: Don't Even Think About Trying To Pick Senator
This has already gotten a bit of attention, but it's worth a quick look: Harry Reid is circulating a letter among Senate Dems today that calls on Governor Blagojevich to step down and even threatens to use the Senate's power to sink any effort Blago might make to pick a Senator.
A Senate leadership aide sends over the letter, which Reid has asked his fellow Dems to sign. Here's the key part:
Please understand that should you decide to ignore the request of the Senate Democratic Caucus and make an appointment we would be forced to exercise our Constitutional authority under Article I, Section 5, to determine whether such a person should be seated.We do not prejudge the outcome of the criminal charges against you or question your constitutional right to contest those charges. But for the good of the Senate and our nation, we implore you refrain from making an appointment to the Senate.
It's virtually impossible to imagine that Blago would try to appoint a Senator at this point. But then again, most of the stuff in the criminal complaint against him would have been virtually impossible to imagine before yesterday morning.
Full letter after the jump.
Late Update: I should have noted this before, but HuffPo's Sam Stein deserves credit for getting the Reid letter first.
December 10, 2008
Dear Governor Blagojevich:
We write to insist that you step down as Governor of Illinois and under no circumstance make an appointment to fill the vacant Illinois Senate seat. In light of your arrest yesterday on alleged federal corruption charges related to that Senate seat, any appointment by you would raise serious questions.
It is within the authority of the Illinois legislature to remove your power to make this appointment by providing for a special election. But a decision by you to resign or to step aside under Article V of the Illinois Constitution would be the most expeditious way for a new Senator to be chosen and seated in a manner that would earn the confidence of the people of Illinois and all Americans. We consider it imperative that a new senator be seated as soon as possible so that Illinois is fully represented in the Senate as the important work of the 111th Congress moves forward.
Please understand that should you decide to ignore the request of the Senate Democratic Caucus and make an appointment we would be forced to exercise our Constitutional authority under Article I, Section 5, to determine whether such a person should be seated.
We do not prejudge the outcome of the criminal charges against you or question your constitutional right to contest those charges. But for the good of the Senate and our nation, we implore you refrain from making an appointment to the Senate.
Sincerely,
Crook Envy
There's been a lot of news to talk about over the last thirty-six hours. But the largest volume of emails has come in in response to yesterday's note from TPM Reader WO's suggesting a contest for most corrupt state. WO took it as a given that the top three contenders were Alaska, Illinois and Louisiana.
Au contraire, say partisans of perhaps a dozen other states -- New Jersey, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, and New York being top claimants.
I know there are a lot of hurt feelings out there. A lot of people feel slighted on behalf of their states. But while a number of these states have impressive histories of corruption, as I told a few emailers, a lot of it really comes down to a case of 'what have you done for me lately?'
Let's run through the issue. As a former proud resident of Rhode Island, there's no doubt that the Ocean State has an extremely impressive history of corruption, with an impressive level of mafia infiltration as a bonus. But TPM Reader JR concedes that those days may be in the past ...
I grew up in RI and now live in MA. I think RI would have won this hands-down 20 yrs ago, but while Lincoln Almond was a completely shitty governor, as US Atty he did a pretty good job of breaking the back of the Patriarca mob family that drove a lot of southern New England's corruption for decades.It's still a huge part of RI's self-identity, though... if they ever named a state movie (in the sense of a state bird or state flower), it would surely be "The Godfather".
Admittedly, in my day we had Buddy Cianci for the Mayor of Providence. He was on his second life at that point, having done a stint in prison after he'd been Mayor the first time. I never did the kind of deep forensic look at what that was all about as I do these days as a reporter (I was a graduate student back then.) But all the stories seemed to come back to kidnapping the guy who slept with his wife, bonking him on the head with a log and doing some sort of low level torture. That's was all in the past in the early and mid-1990s. Alas, a few years after I left Buddy made a return visit to the slammer. At the end of the day though, it was more a faint echo of the real glory days of Rhode Island corruption than a genuine reprise.
New Jersey? Hard to deny the Garden State some serious props (I used to live there too). Readers have mentioned Torricelli and McGreevey, etc. And if the issue is sheer saturation of machine politics and graft, it's a real contender. But perhaps this is the issue: how do you compete with Edwin Edwards a few years ago and William Jefferson with various international shenanigans, $90,000 of frozen cash hidden in his freezer. The list just goes on and on. Or Alaska, two of the three members of the congressional delegation under criminal investigation -- now one of them convicted. And the third member standing out as the clean senator because all she got was a discount vacation house from a fundraiser and political fixer. Or Illinois. Well, two straight governors indicted and then you go from there.
Sure, there's plenty of crooks in New York and New Jersey and Rhode Island. And Massachusetts has its moment. But I'm just not sure any of them can put the kind of serious and recent per capita muck on the table as these three other worthy states. Certainly not when it comes to governors and federal officeholders.
Again, I invite your response if you think I haven't given these states their due.
Late Update: More sour grapes, now from TPM Reader TC ...
I cannot believe that my home, the Garden State, is not in contention as the most corrupt state. Not with its rich tradition of seeing the mayors of its largest city sent to prison. (Three in a row! My favorite is probably Hugh Addonzio, who presided over the '67 riots and ended in prison for, in the federal prosecutor's words, 'delivering the city into the hands of organized crime.")Not with the legendary Hudson County machine, founded by Frank "King Hanky-Panky" Hauge, who ran Jersey City from a suite in the Plaza Hotel during the depths of the Great Depression.
Not after Senator Harrison "Pete" Williams, the only US Senator to do time for dipping his beak during the Abscam affair, or after Senator Bob "the Torch" Torricelli, who left office in disgrace after news broke of his pecuniary friendship with a certain Mr. Chang -- a Chinese-American 'businessman' who did most of his business in North Korea.
Sure, auctioning off a Senate seat is pretty heady stuff. So what does the mob-riddled state that invented 'pay-to-play' got to do to compete? Have its Governor resign in disgrace when it's revealed he had his secret gay lover on the public payroll to the tune of six figures?...
Been there. Done that.
He didn't even mention Sharpe James, not by name at least.
Baseball Prospectus and the BBWAA
The Winter Meetings are the baseball industry’s opportunity not simply to meet and make a few changes, it’s also the place where a lot of the game’s affiliated institutions make moves of their own. That took a different form this morning, as representatives of Baseball Prospectus were informed that the organization’s application to the Baseball Writers’ Association of America had been approved, making the two columnists that BP applied for, Will Carroll and Christina Kahrl, members of the BBWAA.
Since 1996, Baseball Prospectus has been providing coverage of baseball in print and online. In the intervening years, BP has expanded to cover the game in ever-greater detail, giving greater attention to scouting and player injuries in a lineup studded with writing talent and the best predictive statistical modeling in the industry. These are the elements that sustain our commitment to daily coverage online, seven days a week February through October, and six days a week November through January. BP is also a company that has had 16 different books published, some bestsellers, including the annual guide that is indispensable to the fans, media, and industry insiders alike. From initially modest beginnings, it has become an organization with a core group of columnists aided by a dedicated technical support team. These commitments, online and in print, have helped make Baseball Prospectus a standby in all aspects of the baseball industry, a reliable regular feature referred to people inside front offices as well as journalists in print, television, and radio.
For all that we’ve achieved, however, we know that there is even more that we’re capable of in our drive to deliver the best baseball content, and this new challenge is as much a responsibility as an honor. We anticipate that this new level of access will provide BP and its readers with critical additional insight as we provide coverage to all of you that lets us tell the whole story with the fullness it deserves, illustrated by the action on the diamond.
In noting this development, BBWAA president David O’Brien of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution greeted the news with the observation that, “This is an important step forward for the BBWAA, and I’m pleased to have been part of the decision to welcome Baseball Prospectus writers into the organization.”
He went on to observe that in adding our organization to the list of those accredited, “Frankly, there was no good reason not to. Baseball Prospectus is a respected organization with dedicated, full-time baseball writers who cover our sport thoroughly and professionally. They do a great job and provide content that’s influenced our industry.”
The BBWAA’s capacity for change in a changing media environment was reflected in O’Brien’s noting, “Hey, we all know this business is evolving rapidly. BBWAA recognizes that, and I think we showed today that we are open-minded and responsive.”
This is obviously a great day for Baseball Prospectus as an organization, and a reason for personal reflection and excitement alike. This development provides us with a major obligation to not simply enjoy the benefits of our inclusion, not simply to reflect that Baseball Prospectus was and is worthy of inclusion, but that its ongoing coverage of the game will become that much better. From its inception, Baseball Prospectus has aspired to and achieved the highest levels of quality and coverage, but the task at hand is to take it up yet another notch in our desire to deliver information, insight, and analysis as nobody else can.
YouTube's Cleanup
I talked to David Sarno for his article about the changing YouTube guidelines, but one of the things I wanted to say didn't make it in: Many articles and blogs were saying that these guidelines were anti-community and motivated by business interests -- i.e. cleaning up the site to attract more advertisers. But I would make the parallel argument that they are cleaning up the site to retain users. Certainly all social media platforms these days have algorithms that promote and demote different kinds of content, and know that once the racy material starts taking over the front page, the end is near, and everyone will decamp to the next media sharing site. So I think what they're doing is right for their business from a community standpoint as well.
Another Suggestion for U.S. Automakers: Build Railroads
A MUNI streetcar in San Francisco
Photo credit: flickr/mickeynick, Creative Commons licenseLast week, we published a few words of advice for the U.S. auto industry from sustainable business expert Gifford Pinchot III. In short: build windmills.
This week, architect and New Urbanist John Massengale added his own recommendation to the debate: build railroad cars and streetcars.
An excerpt from Massengale's blog post on the subject:
But as momentum grows for the idea that infrastructure money should be spent on things like rail rather than roads (and even neighborhood centers), how about the idea that we the people give the Big Three large contracts for railroad cars and streetcars? We should have a lot more of those, and we're currently buying them from other countries.All the state DOTs are used to privileged positions for feeding at the public trough, but we don't need any more highways. We need high-speed rail (much cleaner and greener than airplanes), light rail and even boulevards for the light rail to run on. For fifty years, we've been giving traffic engineers money to build auto sewers that ruin our cities and blight our countryside. As we reinvent the way we live, we need to reinvent the way we move around. Our cars and our sprawling way of life are the biggest reason why we're number one in pollution and oil depletion.Do you think that Detroit will be able to harness this opportunity for a bright green recovery? We invite you to share your own thoughts in the comments below.
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(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Transportation at 12:00 PM)
Cards O' Braves and Falcons from Kevin
Ok, time to knock out some of these packages that have been rolling in. This one is from Kevin at
Orioles Card O' The Day. This was a mix of Baseball & Football stuff with a couple of surprises. Here's one of the surprises:A Braves pin! I am very close to being one of those guys at the ballgame with the team color pocket polo shirt, checkerboard polyester pants hiked up to my nipples and a big straw hat completely covered with pins, so here's one more pin for the hat.
1995 Donruss Tops of the Order Chipper JonesThis set was Donruss trying to cash in on the Magic: The Gathering craze. It bombed. The game was confusing, there was a big spinner dial that did... something, and baseball CCG games have never caught on with collectors. The main reason they have never caught on, is that everyone tried to copy Magic's system where the really good cards are short printed. See where I'm going here? Someone ripping packs ends up with a bunch of scrubs, set collectors go crazy trying to find the stars and people who already play card and dice based games like Strat-o-matic would rather have all the players to build teams. I got a few packs when it came out hoping to find a Chipper, and now I've got another hole in the collection filled.
1986 Meadow Gold Dale MurphyWooo! Oddball! These cards came in boxes of popsicles.Murph here was paierd up in a panel with Dwight Gooden. How's that for a pair?
1985 Topps TattoosI got Mahler on my bicep, Raffy on my ankle, and you just don't wanna know where Knuckie is.
2008 Goudey Emmitt Smith Berk Ross Hit ParadeI freaking love this set. One card closer now...
1995 Donruss Red Zone Jessie TuggleYep, this is the football version of the CCG. It's even more complicated than the baseball version. Jessie Tuggle's my favorite Falcon though so a nice oddball of the Hammer is always nice.
1994 Collector's Choice Bobby HebertYou have no idea how popular Bobby Hebert is in this town. There are people out there who still want him to be the starting QB for the birds.
1993 Pinnacle Moe GardnerOne last football card to finish up the post. Moe Gardner does a happy dance after penetrating the offensive line. Ya know what, I don't need double entendres with this card. just enjoy.
Thanks again Kevin, I've got some Xmas O's headed your way whenever I am brave enough to deal with the post office!
Not A Quality Public Servant
TPM Reader PN reports from the ground ...
Simply put, Blagojevich is that deadly combination of ignorance and arrogance. One or the other is survivable, but the two, combined, are not.I know from speaking with many of my friends who have worked with him over the years (including on his campaigns) that he is as dumb as a box of rocks. (The campaign folks would never let him talk to the press, unscripted, ala Palin.) He also thought he was God's gift to the planet.
In recent years, his circle of advisers has shrunk to a miniscule three or four who make Bush's "yes men" crew look like a debate society. As a friend in state government told me recently, "Everyday Blagojevich gets up and says 'What can we do today?'" The point being, there is (and has been) no rhyme or reason for his governance. Fundamentally, the guy is an idiot, as the taped conversations prove. He is simply a jackass.
Everything I've heard is completely consistent with PN's report, though that does beg the question of how this goof got elected and reelected in the first place.
(ed.note: Please no emails telling me this is the incorrect use of the phrase 'beg the question', though I know you're right. I've decided that this misuse is too widespread, too serviceable and too lacking in an alternative not to simply persist in using it.)
Late Update: Despite my forewarning, I'm being deluged by emails from purists telling me it would be so easy simply to use "raise" instead of "beg." I guess I'll have to give it more thought.
Actual Substance Update: The answer seems to be that he faced two extraordinarily weak Republican candidates -- though weak for different reasons. So it was really winning the primary in 2002 and that was because of a divided field and because he was a consummate fundraiser -- surprise, surprise.
Wes Anderson interview
On the occasion of the upcoming Criterion release of Bottle Rocket on Blu-ray, the AV Club interviewed Wes Anderson. I love this bit about working with Gene Hackman.
(link)But Gene, I don't think loves being directed in the first place, and I had a lot of particular ideas for the way some things were to be done. He just wasn't getting a huge kick out of it -- but I don't know that he ever does. The main thing is that everything he was doing was great. Even though he can be belligerent, there's a lot of emotion there. I was always excited to be working with him, even when I was a little scared of him, just because this character that I'd spent so much time working on and was so invested in was being brought to life -- not only in all the ways that I'd wanted, but something quite beyond.
Eight Items or Less: Love Guru Stinks, Britney's Number One and London Flights Are Cheap
1. Mike Meyers' Love Guru tops Forbes Magazine's 2008 list of superstar flops. 2. Britney Spears' new album Circus debuts at the top of Billboard's charts this week. It's her fifth number one album. 3. Check out these parodies of 15 corporate logos -- after the crash. 4. We're all getting a little extra time to celebrate on New Year's Eve. One second is being added at 6:59:59 p.m. on December 31. We end up with a 61 second minute due to the slowing rotation of the earth. (via U.S. Naval Observatory) 5. The Washington D.C. metro system is testing new wool seat covers for its rail cars. They hope to replace the naugahyde covers used for the past 30 years. (via DCist) 6. It's almost time to fly to London for a little shopping. The airfares are low and yesterday the pound feel to $1.48 -- down from a peak of $2.11 earlier in the year.
Yahoo! closing Brickhouse by end of year
management would be better served firing themselves
Two advent calendars to choose from
In addition to the yearly Perl Advent Calendar from Mark Fowler, the Catalyst Team have put together their own Catalyst Advent Calendar.
Each calendar gives a new tip or trick or module to use each day. Today's tip on the Perl Advent Calendar is about how to use IPC::Filter to communicate between processes, while yesterday's entry on the Catalyst Advent Calendar discusses how to create PDFs for your web application.
Dubbing The Wire into German
An interview with a translator about the difficulty of dubbing The Wire into German.
To bring over the style of the speech out of the slums or ghettos, we haven't used very exact, grammatically correct German. Nobody says "Wegen des Fahrrads" (because of the bikes), rather "wegen dem Fahrrads" ('cause of them bikes), for example there we use wrong German. Here and there we've used other phrases, sometimes with an English or American sentence structure.
The interview itself was translated from German to English. (via panopticist)
(link)
Republicans Demand Obama Say He Wants Fitzgerald To Stay -- Even Though He Already Has
Hoping to milk the Blago mess for all it's worth, Republicans are demanding that President-elect Obama say whether he wants Patrick Fitzgerald to stay as U.S. Attorney -- even though he's already on record saying that he does.
In an interview published today by Politico, Illinois state Republican chair Andy McKenna, demanded that Obama say whether he favors keeping Fitzgerald in his post. "Some have wondered if Barack Obama would keep Fitzgerald," McKenna said. "It would be great if he confirms that he plans to."
Asked for comment, an Obama transition aide pointed us to a June 5 article in the Chicago Tribune which noted that Obama had been asked if he would keep Fitzgerald in an editorial board meeting with the paper in several months earlier. His reply (via Nexis):
"I still think he's doing a good job. Yes."Asked why he would keep him, Obama continued:
"I think he has been aggressive in putting the city on notice and the state on notice that he takes issues of public corruption seriously."That should put the matter to rest, but given the GOP's determination to use the Blago case to tar Obama's reformist image, it probably won't, unless Obama reaffirms his commitment to keeping Fitz in the current context.
Bob Petrillose, Hot Truck Founder and French Bread Pizza Inventor, Dies
"Bob built his life around the Hot Truck, striving to put out a very, very high-quality product."
From left: The Hot Truck, Bob Petrillose.
This morning, some sobering news to report. Bob Petrillose has died after fighting Parkison's Disease. Petrillose is the man credited with having invented French bread pizza (later licensed to Stouffer's) and is the founder of the legendary Hot Truck on the campus of Cornell University, in Ithaca, New York.
In the 1960s, when pizzerias weren't spread as thick as mozzarella on Ithaca's landscape, and the concept of pizza delivery was still a few years away, fresh pizza available right next to the dorms, and a short walk from Collegetown housing, was a boon. Before long, tiring of selling pizza by the slice, he hit on the winning combination of pizza sauce, fresh cheese and toppings, and French bread, dubbed the "Poor Man's Pizza," or "PMP."
Through the 1990s, Petrillose worked every night when students were in town, taking a break when classes weren't in session. He and his wife prepared their homemade meatballs and Italian link sausage in their home kitchen on Pleasant Grove Road, and then he, usually working with just a sole student taking orders, slipping trays in the ovens, and packing up the sandwiches, worked late into the night filling the stomachs of students, alumni, townies, and visitors.
Though I've never had (and now will never have) a "PMP" or a "Sui" or an "MBC" made by the man himself, I can't help but feel saddened by Mr. Petrillose's death.
Before I knew who he was, I had had countless French bread pizzas.
Thank you, Bob.
And after having eaten the crazy good sandwiches from the food truck he founded, I owe him a debt of gratitude measured in deliciousness—even if that deliciousness pales in comparison to the Petrillose-owned Hot Truck fare (Ithacans and Cornell alumni would probably say the post-Petrillose Hot Truck is a shadow of its former self).
My friend Dan Dickinson, who advised me to try the Hot Truck on my first visit to Ithaca (and who broke this news to me), shares his own Hot Truck memories here and even quotes a moving comment from Serious Eats community member crob77, which I will in turn requote:
I went to Cornell from '95 to '00 – back in the days when Bob still owned and operated the truck. For the next several years following my time at Cornell, I continued to make visits to the hot truck – averaging 6 or 7 visits a years, during which time the truck was no longer owned or operated by Bob. I visited again about 2 years ago, and finally this past year. In total, I have eaten at the Hot Truck over 400 times (which included a stretch of 65 straight evenings).
I tell you that not to brag… but just to lend some credence to my perspective on the Hot Truck. Needless to say, I am a big Hot Truck fan. Rather, I was a big hot truck fan. Although I still enjoy a hot truck sandwich, in my opinion, it is a shell of its former self when Bob was still there running and operating the joint.
The reason is simple. Bob built his life around the Hot Truck, striving to put out a very, very high quality product. He was a permanent fixture in the truck, rarely missing a day, and making sandwiches from the time the truck arrived at it’s spot – around 10pm… till the truck closed and drove away for the evening – ranged from 2:30 till around 5am. In spite of the late hours, he and his wife would make may of the add-on ingredients in their home during the course of the day – which included amazing home made meatballs and sausages.
On probably half of my Hot Truck visits, I entered the truck to talk to Bob and watch my sandwich being prepared. At the time I was at Cornell, many students would do this. Bob knew most of the regulars’ names, would ask how you were doing, and then would recount stories of his past 40+ years. He would also make fun of the drunk idiots outside (I was often drunk myself… but it was still funny to watch). There are really too many stories to recount, but anyone who experienced the banter or enjoyment of watching Bob make your sandwich on a late evening understands what I am talking about.
Our condolences go out to Mr. Petrillose's family, friends, and all the people whose bodies and spirits were warmed by his food and company on a cold night.
Related
A Visit to the Hot Truck
Hot Truck Info and Menu [everything2.com]
Shortstop Deli [Roadfood.com]
Keep on Truckin' [foodmanagement.com]
Shortstop Deli [current Hot Truck operator]
CU Alums Hope to Make the Hot Truck's Subs a National Obsession [The Cornell Chronicle]
December 9, 2008
New York City Area
I’m sure I’ve heard this term in passing, but today in a meeting with a foundation that’s historically focused on grassroots groups in New York City it really hit home how gentrification is pushing people to further strata of the urban donut. In the selection of its cover graphic, the organization chose to zoom out, widen the map and refer not to “New York City,” but the “New York City Area.”
The org, it seems, is increasingly working with people who can’t afford to actually live in the City, but who still work or organize there — people living in northeastern New Jersey, north of the Bronx or east of Queens.
It sounds a bit like “Bay Area” vs “San Francisco.” Something larger than the property lines of the five boroughs but smaller than the tri-state region or New York metropolitan area.
NY1's Pat Kiernan Launches New Site
Everyone's favorite NY1 anchor (and Paul Rudd fantasy football team), Pat Kiernan, has branched out his In the Papers feature with a website called Pat's Papers. Described as "a carefully edited collection of US news headlines," the top stories are delivered once Kiernan edits down the best from not only the nation's papers, but "international news to domestic politics to science to gossip." In about six minutes, he sums it all up—take a look at today's webcast:
By the way: hi Pat, we love you! He's totally reading this right now.
Starting Pitcher: The Mets and a Starting Pitcher
Mets GM Omar Minaya told reporters earlier today that he has checked in with a variety of free-agent starting pitchers, and he has talked with other teams about potential trades.
That said, from what I understand, though they have been in contact with his office, the Mets have yet to sit down with Scott Boras while in Vegas.
According to people connected to the team, the Mets are unwilling to give Oliver Perez a
four-year deal; they prefer Derek Lowe, but only to a point; and they have only ‘limited interest in Jon Garland.’
I believe the team would prefer to do better than Garland, frankly – though I personally feel he’d be a good addition, even on a two-year deal.
According to previous reports, the Mets have shown interest in free-agent Randy Wolf, but I have never heard his name mentioned by people familiar with the team’s strategy.
Also, for what it’s worth, I never hear Ben Sheets mentioned, which I hope is just coincidence – since he, too, would be worth signing on a shorter-term deal.
The sense I get is Boras will hold off on serious talks for Perez, who is said to be seeking a four-
year deal, until late December. To me, it makes sense for him to work on deals for Lowe, and other top clients, while then pitching Perez to teams who were ‘left at the alter,’ so to speak.
This is why I feel the Mets must hold on to their prospects, and not use them in a deal for a bat or a set-up man, because my hunch is they’re going to need them when trying to upgrade their starting rotation.
Ultimately, as has been suggested in multiple reports, I believe the Mets will be forced to sign a free-agent starting pitcher, Garland if necessary, then trade for a younger pitcher who we didn’t see coming, to compete with Jon Niese.
Speaking of starting pitchers…
Jon Heyman at SI.com believes the Yankees could make a five-year offer to free-agent A.J. Burnett.
The Cubs need to trade Jason Marquis, in order to get Jake Peavy from the Padres, reports Jeff Passan at Yahoo! Sports – for the tedious blow-by-blow, go to MLB Trade Rumors.
The Journal-Sentinel says the Brewers have not increased their offer to CC Sabathia, according to the team’s GM.
Lastly, Danny Knobler from CBS Sports believes the Angels are still a serious suitor for Sabathia.
Goodies from Wax Heaven
I'm completely, totally, incredibly behind in everything, but I'm going to post these packages if it kills me. This one from Mario at Wax Heaven arrived in the mail yesterday. I haven't sent him anything in months though and this just came out of the blue. I'm still trying to get my hands on his Christmas present, as the guy who has it now is hard to track down. Maybe this weekend...
Anyway, here are the complete contents of Mario's trade/gift/whatever, probably the last time I show off everything in a package until I catch up. That will probably be about 2013.The Best Card In The Package:That's right, a 2008 Timelines Timeless Teams Chipper Jones. that's the best one. I've been picking up packs here and there hoping for one of these for weeks. Now I finally have my Turner Field Stadium shot:
And you can't see the brand new tomahawking Chick-Fil-A cow, thank God.
Three Low Numbered Jersey Cards:Woooo! Jerseys! Numbered to 130 is still low numbered nowadays, right? Anyway, here's the swag:
2004 Upper Deck Authentic Stars Rafael Furcal #32/75
2005 SPXtreme Stats TimHudson #106/130
2007 Ultimate America's PAstime Andruw Jones #21/75
I didn't have any of these and I'd never seen the Ultimate jersey before. The Ultimate is nice, it's kinda patriotic.2008 Donruss Threads Aaron & MurphThis is a team set, I think... I'm not sure if the Braves draft pick is in the set or not. I now have an extra Murpoh to send along in the Xmas packages too!
2007 Bowman Sterling Jeff LockeBelieve it or not, this is the first Bowman Sterling card I've gotten my hands on. It looks like... Chrome with delusions of grandeur. Not bad stuff though. Jeff Locke is the prospect Kevin Towers wanted that derailed the Peavy trade, so I guess he's pretty good.
2008 Stadium Club Gregor Blanco 1st day issue #183/199There were three Stadium Club cards in there, but this was the most interesting. It's a 1st day issue card, but it's really thick and is serial numbered on the back. Is this the hobby version?
A Mess O' BravesSome Braves to keep and some Braves to give away. I'm still working on the Xmas packages, by the way. I'll have an update for y'all probably tomorrow.
1997 Bowman ChromeMaddog and Smoltzie! I have neither of these as I didn't get into BowChro all that much in the '90s. I didn't see the point when there was Bowman's Best. these are really nice looking cards though, I can see why they are some of Mario's favorites.
An Almost Team Set of 1997 Pinnacle CeritfiedThe team set is only missing Klesko and I've probably got 3 or 4 of that card. This is another really nice looking set, but all the cards are really curved. And by all the cards, I mean 'every one ever produced in the history of civilzation'. Talk about shiny... you could shave using these things. They all have that protective film on them too. To peel or not to peel, that is the question...
Thanks again Mario! You'll be getting something soon as soon as I track down that guy with your card. Check out Wax Heaven for some more bloggy goodness!
That's A Contest We Can Believe In
TPM Reader WO cuts to the heart of the story ...
I think you guys should do a Most Corrupt State smackdown. Maybe get CREW, POGO, ProPublica, and whoever else wants to help to cooperate. I think it's pretty clear that the only three serious contenders are Illinois, Louisiana, and Alaska. My money would be on the young upstart, Alaska, over the grizzled corruption veterans of Illinois and Louisiana, but who knows. Statistics should play a part in the contest, but style points are important, too. Cash in the freezer is pretty impressive, as is trying to shake down the President-Elect.Late Update: Outrage from TPM Reader JP: "Who could leave Rhode Island off the list of most corrupt states!! This is defamatory!! Ocean Staters will NOT be insulted in this way!! Don't make me go ALL CAPS on this thing!!! A very dark day for TPM...." I don't know. I'm a former Rhode Islander. I used to live about a half dozen blocks from the official Gov's mansion on Benefit Street when Buddy Cianci was mayor. But I'm not sure the Ocean State can really stand up to these three state's recent record. I'd need to see more evidence.
Shocking Developments
First the Governor of Illinois tries to sell Obama's senate seat. Now Joe the Plumber is turning on John McCain!
TPMtv: The Untouchable
In a tour de force midday press conference in Chicago, U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald (yes, that Patrick Fitzgerald), who has been pursuing public corruption cases in Illinois for more than seven years, laid out the stunning new charges against Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich and his chief of staff. Everything, it seems, had a price, including Barack Obama's vacant Senate seat. "If [Illinois] isn't the most corrupt state in the United States, it's certainly one hell of a competitor," the lead FBI agent on the case declared:
Full-size video at TPMtv.com.
★ Deep Green
Joachim Bondo’s Deep Green chess game for the iPhone is out. What’s cool about Deep Green isn’t just that it’s the best chess game yet for the iPhone, but that Bondo’s original Deep Green was the best chess game for the Newton. To be clear, this is not a port but a complete rewrite, with the same attention to detail, graphics, simplicity, and fun that marked the Newton version. For example, Deep Green for iPhone lets you move pieces either by drag-and-drop or by tapping a piece, then tapping the square you wish to move it to. (The tapped piece jiggles while waiting for you to tap the destination square.)
Deep Green is the one indie Newton app that I was most hoping would make the jump to the iPhone. When I met Joachim at WWDC this year and he told me he was working on it, I was delighted. I’ve been beta testing Deep Green for the last few weeks, and I’m not sure what to say about it other than that it looks and feels exactly how an iPhone chess game should. (I can’t speak to its strength as a serious chess engine; it kicks my ass even when taking no more than one second to move. I don’t recall ever beating Deep Green on the Newton either, but it seems stronger now, if only because my brain hasn’t kept pace with the increase in CPU speeds over the past decade.)
Deep Green exemplifies my fundamental rule for iPhone UI designers: Figure out the absolute least you need to do to implement the idea, do just that, and then polish the hell out of the experience. Configuration is kept to a minimum but everything essential is there. It even launches fast. Via email, Bondo told me:
When I compare the various iPhone chess apps (I bought them all), Deep Green offers pretty much the same functionality as the rest, and sometimes more, but with a fraction of the UI. Achieving this is why I’m 4 months later than the rest.
It takes more time and more effort to make software with a simpler UI, but it’s worth it.
On his web site, Bondo writes:
I first released Deep Green 10 years ago, in April 1998, for Apple’s Newton. In a matter of days hereafter, Steve Jobs terminated the Newton altogether.
Somehow I don’t think he’ll have that problem with the iPhone.
Deep Green is available in the App Store for an introductory price of $4.99 through the end of December; after that, it goes to $7.99.
Red "Panda" trying to steal panda thunder
Ummm... Excuse me? Red Panda? WHO DO YOU THINK YOU ARE TRYING TO FOOL. This is a panda, you little sneaky jerk-off. Just because you are holding bamboo doesn't make you a panda, BELIEVE ME, I'VE TRIED. You are a fox or a raccoon, or some kind of rodent or something.
Where did you have this picture taken anyway, Sears? Are you that desperate to prevent your species from total annihilation? AND STOP TAKING UP SO MUCH MEMORY WHEN I OPEN MULTIPLE TABS.
Google's Latest Massive Scanning Project: Classic Old Magazines
Pretty fricking great: This morning Google added dozens of old magazines to its Book Search database. These are scans of entire magazines, ads included. What a trove it is, and I'm sure it's just the beginning. Here is New York magazine in its earliest glory days:Now we just gotta get them to add the full run of Spy (the funny years, at least).
News: Mets sign Francisco Rodriguez
Update, 4:37 PM:
To watch SI.com’s Jon Heyman speak with SNY’s Matt Yalloff about the deal between the Mets and Rodriguez, click here.
Update, 4:06 PM:
The Mets have announced that Minaya will speak to reporters in a more formal setting at 6 pm EDT.
Update, 4:04 PM:
Minaya told reporters that the deal with Francisco Rodriguez is not done, ‘until it is signed, sealed and delivered.’
That said, I have been told by people connected to the team that the deal is done – all that remains is a physical.
Update, 3:48 PM:
In an impromptu discussion from the hotel lobby, Minaya told reporters the deal is not ‘completely done,’ and that discussions are still ‘on-going,’ according to a text message to MetsBlog from Joe Hamrahi of Baseball Digest Daily.
…naturally he is going to say this…
…GMs do not give an inch until every i is dotted, every t is crossed, and the physical is complete…
That said, according to Hamrahi, Minaya’s body language indicates the deal is done.
Update, 3:46 PM:
“The deal includes a $14 million vesting option for a fourth year that would raise the total value of the contract to $51 million,” reports Ken Rosenthal at FoxSports.com.
According to Rosenthal, the option kicks in if Rodriguez pitches a certain number of innings in either the third year of the deal or in a combination of years two and three.
Update, 3:45 PM:
Minaya is in the lobby of the Bellagio, smiling and speaking with various reporters, including ESPN’s Peter Gammons.
Original, 3:24 PM:
According to Ted Berg at SNY, “The Mets have agreed to terms with reliever Francisco Rodriguez on a three-year contract worth $37 million, pending a physical.”
…from what i understand, there may also be a fourth-year option, which will vest following a certain number of appearances…
As I wrote earlier today, the Mets and Rodriguez agreed in principle yesterday evening. However, they would meet again this afternoon to finalize the contract, after which Rodriguez will need to conduct a physical.
…the buzz in New York suggests the team will make an official announcement either later tonight or tomorrow morning, and hopes to hold a quick press conference in Las Vegas tomorrow…however, rodriguez may need to travel to New York for a physical, so i am not sure how all of this will work…
…by the way, the term being used in baseball, for the way Omar Minaya handled negotiations, is The Reverse Boras…
Freaks and Geeks Status Report: John Francis Daley Now on Bones; Samm Levine Hired by Quentin Tarantino
John Francis Daley, who played Sam Weir on the world-historically brilliant NBC show Freaks and Geeks almost a decade ago, has had a relatively quiet career since finishing puberty, watching mostly from the sidelines as various F&G cohorts--James Franco, Seth Rogen, Jason Segel, and Linda Cardellini, not to mention Judd Apatow and Paul Feig--have reached stardom or near stardom. Daley has worked occasionally since F&G, including a starring role in the apparently shelved Star Wars-inspired film 5-25-77, which I wrote about in 2005. He's also done TV work here and there. It turns out that Daley recently joined the cast of the Fox murder-investigations show Bones. The show seems pretty lame, and it's not something I'd ever watch. But it's interesting to see Daley as a young-adult version of the twitchy, sweet, geeky freshman he played on F&G. The first clip below is a short scene from Bones; the second, after the jump, is an interview with Daley on some cheesy entertainment show.
transformer running shoes
we recently stumbled upon these nike shoe transformer toys. although they were originally released last year,
one can’t help but re-examine these designs. each transformers is packaged in a nike shoe box. inside the box
the toy looks like a typical nike running shoe, however once you start playing around you realize that the shoe
is actually a transformers toy. more images can be found here.
morenat 2 the transformable shoe
Postal services and pneumatic tubes
My big project -- possibly undergirding my dissertation in a year: Postal services and pneumatic tube systems in the late 19th and early 20th century, especially in Paris. I'm reading these services in terms of their urban interfaces, their material qualities and the interest in the 1870s-1890s of physical networks across cities. Paris is interesting because of an explosion of postal and telegraph products and services, the response to the siege of the city (Balloon Post!), and the shift from electric to material form to someone's doorstep in terms of message delivery. The Hôtel des Postes fascinates because of its ingenious interfaces within the building and its processing capability; the pneumatic tubes are fascinating because they make manifest the force of air and use it to literally propel information across a building or a city.During the same four-year period when the word "interface" was first used, in which the notion of networks proliferated, Julien Guadet (1834-1908) designed the Hôtel des Postes (1880- 1884) in Paris, the central office for the French postal network. An enormous civic architectural undertaking, the Hôtel des Postes sorted, moved, marked, placed in sacks, audited, loaded and transported letters, periodicals and packets at high speeds, before sending them out again to their destinations. For Guadet and bureaucratic chronicler of Paris Maxime Du Camp, La Poste represented a living system that they described in anthropomorphic terms. Guadet described the postal system as epileptically fast; du Camp compared it to a heart that "draws in its correspondence and forces it back out to distribute in every direction." Beyond these biological comparisons, however, Guadet designed the Hôtel des Postes to operate as an ordinateur--a computer processor--atop the postal network. The Hôtel des Postes represents a nascent, modern approach to designing buildings, one that translated organizational, functional requirements into form.Fueling communication through pipes that ran under cities at speeds of up to 50 km per hour, the pneumatic post served as an urban subterranean communication network from the 1850s into the early 21st century, first in Europe, then the United States, and by the early 20th century, South America and Australia. Depending on the city, pneumatic tubes shuttled telegrams or letters and packages, both commercial and personal, as an antidote to increasing urban congestion and traffic on the streets above. Messages delivered by pneumatic dispatch surfaced in post offices and train stations, where messengers carried them by bicycle (or later, motorcycle or truck) from the post or telegraph branch to their final destinations. For commercial buildings, pneumatic tubes offered ready communication systems between and within any enterprises that required the movement of receipts and paper. At once buried and tangled, emerging into the interiors of buildings and offering varied interfaces for its users, the pneumatic tube presents an enigmatic image of modernity--the merger of construction and communication.
Pneumatic networks preceded electrification, first powered by steam and only by electricity in the early 20th century. They enjoyed a long lifespan. Implemented first in London in 1853 as an information conduit between the London Stock Exchange and the Central Post Office, the technology quickly transferred to other cities. Berlin began its Rohrpost in 1865; Paris built its first pneumatic networks in 1866 and began public Poste Pneumatique in 1879; Philadelphia followed suit for first class post in 1893 and New York in 1897. Urban tube networks existed for a surprisingly long time, remaining in operation until 1953 in New York, 1984 in Paris and 2002 in Prague (where it was only taken out of service by a flood that destroyed much of the tube infrastructure).
I must admit, I'm surprised to find myself heading toward a 19th century dissertation topic, and at that, one that deals with France. But working on tubes and postal services lets me explore the things that I love about tangible networks and interfaces. They make me realize just how much we have to learn from these old and often forgotten modes of transmission.
Who Would Michelle Obama Wear to the Inauguration?!
This morning I was reading about how the Obama Inauguration Committee is in a bit of pickle in terms of balancing the depressed mood of the nation and the celebratory nature of the historic inauguration of our first-ever black president. In all the stories, one question -- how they're going to pull off this delicate balancing act -- constantly came up. What kind of tuxedo will Mr. Prez choose, what will be deemed the official ball and will they keep the celebs at bay, etc. It was all a little bleak. But then, I came across WWD's commissioned portfolio featuring what various designers, if given the opportunity, would create for the First-Lady-to-be Michelle Obama for the ceremony and party after, as well as Malia and Sasha. And wow! This was a such a double fantasy of a window shopping experience that picked me right up. Some were outrageously over-the-top (hello, Betsey Johnson and Christian Lacroix!) and some were tastefully glamourous in white. But seeing as how Michelle seems to go for bright happy colors and her penchant for American designers, maybe she'll choose Isaac Mizrahi's delicious raspberry number. But I must say, Christian Lacroix's sketches are OMG-amazing! Click here to see the entire portfolio. Clockwise from top left: Christian Lacroix, Karl Lagerfeld (for Chanel), Isaac Mizrahi, Betsey Johnson, Osacar de la Renta, Diane von Furstenberg and Peter Som All photos from WWD.com.
Poetry @ YouTube
YouTube user joshuamarie77 is the poet Joshua Marie Wilkinson, whose poemfilm journal, Rabbit Light Movies, was mentioned in a much earlier post. Snippets of these episodes are available for viewing on YouTube but haven't been updated for several months. That's probably because he has switched over to Vimeo. I love the scruffiness of YouTube but, I admit, the Vimeo videos look more professional. What a difference context makes. Compare and contrast with this video of Joyelle McSweeney reading "Piaf":
Joyelle McSweeney from joshuamarie on Vimeo.Amy King has a more active YouTube channel, amyhappens. She curated and moderated a panel on Race and Poetry for the 2008 Boog City Festival. I missed the festival entirely so I'm grateful that she has posted videos of this event. I'm slowly making my way through her videos of the panel.
Wade Boggs and the Horse He Rode in on
ESPN is running a series about 2008's greatest sports moments. Chris Jones writes about the final night of Yankee Stadium, and includes a touching bit about the horse that Wade Boggs rode after the Yankees won the Series in 1996:
But this is what I'll remember most: In the press box that night, everybody talked about the time Wade Boggs rode that cop's horse around the warning track after the Yankees won the Series in 1996. It made me wonder what happened to the horse. Nearly 12 years had passed; I figured the horse was dead.
After the game, I saw a long row of cops on horseback in rightfield. Just maybe. It was a long shot, but what's great about sports is that sometimes long shots come through. Caught up in the night's floodlit optimism, I asked the first cop in line if he knew what happened to Boggs' horse.
"You mean Beau," he replied.
My heart jumped. "Beau?"
"Yeah, Beau. He's retired. Living on a farm upstate."
"Really?"
"Yeah, he's lovin' life."
"Wow. What about the cop?"
"Lieutenant Jimmy Higgins," he said with a smirk. "He's retired too. Sorta."
"He's working security or something?"
"Nah, nothin' like that."
The cop was quiet for a long time.
"I think he's a nurse," he said. "But don't tell nobody."
A lot can happen in a year. A lot more can happen in 12, or in 85. On a night when it was so hard to tell the beginning from the end, I discovered that Beau the horse is living out his days in a New York pasture and Lieutenant Jimmy Higgins is a nurse.
I'll remember that.
"Higher-Order Perl" available for free download
Mark-Jason Dominus' fantastic book Higher-Order Perl is now available for free download at http://hop.perl.plover.com/book/.
MJD notes:
This is better than the bootleg copies available from download sites in at least three ways:
- It is the complete text of the second printing, which incorporates many minor corrections; the bootleg copies are all bootlegs of the first printing.
- It does not have a nasty little grafitto advertising a vainglorious bootlegger plastered on every page.
- It was come by honestly, not stolen from the printer.
Everyone is now out of excuses for not having read it. Go read it now if you have not. You will not be sorry.
Google’s scanning magazines…..
Google Books includes magazines now. Here’s an image from the May 1911 issue of Popular Science.
I Heart Coffee: Back-of-Napkin Line Art
Illustrator Christoph Niemann just posted some love notes to coffee at his NY Times blog, all rendered in brew-on-napkin. I especially like his story about trying coffee-flavored ice cream for the first time -- it reminded me of the first bitter sip I snuck from my dad's coffee cup.
A Night at the Museum
A few weeks ago, as a surprise gift for our anniversary, my wife got us a night's stay at the Revolving Hotel Room, part of theanyspacewhatever exhibition at the Guggenheim.
Created by Carsten Höller, the room is a remarkable art installation that also happens to be a complete room suite that you can stay in for a night, letting us live the dream of camping out in the museum and sneaking out among the exhibits while it's closed.
I had no inkling of the plan, just being told by my wife when to be ready to go out. Adding to the surreality, the BBC was there to greet us, filming our entrance and initial encounter with the exhibit for their video segment.
I had been inclined to write a Yelp-style review of the stay ("The continental breakfast served in the morning was serviceable, but our room didn't even have a television!"), but since the Revolving Hotel Room is sold out, it seemed as if that would be unnecessary. As it turns out, the signature revolving motions of the platforms that hold the furniture in the room are barely noticeable once you're asleep, though when you're awake it's very easy to observe how quickly you're moving. In fact, that only thing that might have kept the night from being restful was the noise generated by the other exhibit pieces, echoing through the giant open rotunda of the building. But we had a friendly attendant/guide/security guard who, after escorting us through a personal tour of all the exhibits, graciously turned off all the artworks that used bright lights or loud sounds.
Right when we returned from our stay in the room, Alaina posted a brief writeup as well as a photo set on Flickr including some images and video from our vantage point staying in the room. Since our stay was only the third night the room was open, not many reviews or images of the exhibit had filtered out, so we inspired quite a few follow-up stories, from Gothamist's salacious take to Art21's more analytical look. Art21 also hints at the part of the experience that perhaps lingers with me most: The other exhibits we took in.
Being able to see the museum uncrowded and unhurried by the usual crush of competing patrons was the most memorable and distinctive part of the experience. We could take our time, really appreciate the works (as well as the incredible architecture of one of NYC's signature buildings), and form our opinions without the awareness of thousands of people around us. The fact that, to me, many of the works seemed informed by the short, text-heavy world I live in, all a blur of Twitter updates and SMS messages, made the exhibit in its entirety particularly resonant.
The truth is, the Guggenheim as a space makes a terrible hotel. The room was hardly secluded, the amenities were perfunctory, and while the bed and chairs were comfortable enough, the gracious staff was the only part of the experience that compares to the quality of other fine hotels. That being said, I'd stay there again in a second.
What Do Your Nails Say About You?
Tina Fey's wearing little more than an American flag on the cover of January's Vanity Fair.
The unusually sexy look for the geek chic comedienne continues in the Annie Liebovitz-shot editorial with an exposed black bra and demonic red pumps. In fact, the stylists and makeup artists manicured every inch of the actress - except for her hands.
Despite the crazy campy look, the dancing-lolling-vamping Fey wears her nails short and bare as if, gasp, they actually belong to Tina Fey. Because messing with someone's nails is like making them wear a mask.
Some people talk with their hands, but everyone's hands talk for them. Anxious? Your chewed up nails give you away. High maintenance? We're terrified of your crimson claws.
[Side story: A friend of mine confessed that her boss's nails used to make her sick. The attorney "would openly gnaw on them in court" leaving an unprofessional and unattractive set of nails in his nervous wake. Are you surprised that a Manhattan lawyer can get away with that? Don't be. After all, the self-styled bad-ass defends killers for a living and as my friend said: "I doubt anyone ever gave him shit."]
The moral of the story is: Your nails tell the truth about who you are. If Tina Fey's all-American hooker garb included Revlon Raven Red on her fingertips, she would've looked like an actual hooker. Whereas bare nails make her Tina Fey dressed up as a hooker. Which in turn make the pictures funny - not embarrassing.
So what do your nails say about you? Are you telling people you're a little punk rock with that Black Satin, even though you're in bed by 11 every night? Or maybe you're coming off as a little tacky with those tips?
--GLENNA GOLDIS (our new weekly beauty columnist!)
Careful What You ASk For
This is Gov. Blagojevich yesterday, responding to reports that he was being wiretapped by the feds:
Congrats David Byrne and Brian Eno for Rocking College Radio
The David Byrne and Brian Eno record marches on.
After being available exclusively at EverythingThatHappens.com for sixty days (powered by Topspin), David Byrne and Brian Eno’s “Everything That Happens Will Happen Today” found its way to iTunes, Amazon (on sale for $5!), etc and is available on CD at your local store as well.
The album has reached a new generation of Byrne and Eno fans through college radio: last week it found its way to the coveted #1 spot on the CMJ AAA charts, and #3 on the CMJ Radio 200. The word continues to spread as other radio stations (e.g.- Seattle’s KEXP, New York’s WNEW) have embedded the streaming media widget on their site, enabling their fans to stream the entire album for free and embed the widget on their own sites. If you have seen the widget around the net, snap a screenshot and add it to the ever-growing Flickr pool.
Also worth mentioning, White Denim has received 5-star reviews from The Times and Observer Music Monthly, and made it to the “Best of 2008″ list from The Guardian. Haven’t heard them yet? Check out their appearance on “From the Basement.”
Obama And Blagojevich: Obama's Response?
Okay, here's your Blagojevich thread. As you may have heard by now, Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich was arrested today on charges he tried to sell or trade Obama's Senate seat.
According to today's pool report, Obama canceled an FBI briefing today, perhaps because of the news, and it's known that top Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett -- a.k.a. "Senate Candidate 1," in the indictment -- is at the center of the case, though there's no suggestion of any wrongdoing on her part. From the indictment:
In a conversation with Harris on November 11, the charges state, Blagojevich said he knew that the President-elect wanted Senate Candidate 1 for the open seat but "they're not willing to give me anything except appreciation. [Expletive] them."In other words, the Obama team wouldn't play. The Obama transition has yet to respond to the story or detail how much Obama and his advisers knew about the probe into the Illinois governor. A reader suggests a two-tiered response for Obama:
1. I'd hope that Obama will issue a public request for Blago to resign without making a Senate appointment.2. I think one of Obama's best personal PR moves would be to announce that he will request Patrick Fitzgerald to stay on as US Attorney in Chicago.
BREAKING: Long Troubled Vesuvio Bakery For Sale
Soho: It has been a long feared possibility that Vesuvio Bakery—the 90 year-old Prince Street staple that closed "for renovations" back in July—would never reopen. And we're sad to be the ones to say that is probably the case. Check it, from Craigslist:
"Great Bakery - cafe or retail shopNow, there is the small chance that no one will snatch this up and team Vesuvio will reopen. But in all reality, she's dunzo. Pay your respects, sign the graffitied note to customers: it's time to move on.
$5,500 per month
400 sq ft, plus 1,000 sf basement
two 400 sf coal bread ovens vented through chimneys
$140k key money"
· EaterWire: Vesuvio Closed for Renovations [~E~]
· Waiting for Vesuvio: Bakery Still Closed, Missed [~E~]
Blagojevich Blogging
At TPMmuckraker, Zach Roth is poring through the documents released this morning by the feds. Blagojevich is comically corrupt, by the feds' account. Here's a guy who has been under federal investigation for three years but who still thinks he can appoint himself to Obama's Senate seat and remake himself for a run for President in 2016:
"I've got this thing and it's [expletive] golden, and, uh, uh, I'm just not giving it up for [expletive] nothing. I'm not gonna do it. And, and I can always use it. I can parachute me there."
Just Got In
So anything interesting going on this morning?
● The prolific John Munch
According to IMDB and Wikipedia (here too), Richard Belzer has appeared as Detective John Munch on ten different television shows, more than any other character on television. An exhaustive John Munch viewing would include shows from the following programs:
Homicide: Life on the Street
Law & Order
X-Files
Law & Order: Special Victims Unit
The Beat
Law & Order: Trial By Jury
Arrested Development
Paris enquêtes criminelles (aka Law & Order: Paris)**
The Wire
Sesame StreetBelzer surpassed John Ratzenberger and George Wendt, who played barflies Cliff Clavin and Norm Peterson in six different series: Cheers, St. Elsewhere, The Tortellie, Wings, The Simpsons, and Frasier. (Ratzenberger apparrently enjoys continuity; he's done a voice in every single Pixar movie, nine in all.) Munch/Belzer have been prolific in the matrimonial arena as well. Between the two, they've been married seven times (Munch:4 and Belzer: 3).
** It's unclear from the sources that I read if Munch has appeared on this show or will appear in the future.
Update: Two more things. The Munch character was inspired by real-life Baltimore homicide detective Jay Landsman...who both inspired another character on The Wire (named Jay Landsman) and appears in The Wire as a police lieutenant. All three -- Munch, the fake Landsman, and the real Landsman -- appeared in a fifth season episode called Took. Oh, and Munch, like many other television characters, is a figment of an autistic kid's fertile imagination. (thx, scott & logan)
Cold Weather Riding Tips
Ed. note: We’ve covered riding in the rain and after hearing from our readers, are gathering Cold Weather Riding tips into a post. Well-timed with this essay Patti Dobrowolski, CAT 4 women’s Development Team Captain (and visualizer), WOW wrote for us. Whether your riding urban, commuting to work, racing, or training, these tips should help.
Baby It’s cold Outside
In the PNW it is finally getting cold out and I always have to remind myself about what’s different when riding in the cold. I came from Colorado where it gets “frickin” cold but it often has a lovely sun in the sky and it is dry, so as long as you have a face mask on, you’re set. Seattle, just slightly cold but really, really wet.
Wet + Cold = Very Cold
Simple reminders for the chilly weather:
Clothing
What to wear?
Better to err on the side of too much on than too little. Everyone is different - duh- but in terms of what people wear you can see a big difference when you are out there on a team ride. It always cracks me up to see these guys cycling in shorts when it is like 40 or below. Okay studbo! Those lobster legs look guuuuud! Sexy!
Something on your head? Let’s not do those silly do-rags - you are not on a Harley. But, is it under 45 degrees? Better wear something on your head under your helmet but please not a hat cover thingy? Not a good look. Under not over your helmet is the rule.
Gloves - Someone else famous in the cycling world was quoted as saying your gloves are the most important clothing item that keeps you warm when riding. Sometimes I actually bring two sets of gloves just in case my hands get too hot or too wet. (but then I also carry two tires, two pumps, two lights, two…I am of the team captains, say no more)
Coat or vest? Yup. In Colorado, we always carried a raincoat, where the weather could go from 75 and beautiful to below 30 in about 15 minutes. Be prepared.
Underthingys - yes that smartwool shirt that Bikehugger has looks groovelicious - am waiting for a Women’s SMALL to come my way. C’mon Byron! Shoe covers? I learned the hard way that you can’t buy those really thick ones in Seattle like we needed in Colorado because well…they get filled with water and suddenly you are have two full buckets and you are turning them over and over and over… Everyone has a different trick about keeping your feet warm. Dry is rarely an option in the PNW even if you wear something rubbery, because hey, rubber makes you sweat.
Eating
Eating during the cold weather is way more important than you think. What happens when you are cold is your body burns more carbs to keep you warm and toasty and so there you are thinking you can get a cup of Joe and pain o’ chocolat like you do in the summer and then about 20 minutes into the team ride you are riding all by yourself having watched your team ride away while you pedaled frantically but could not keep up.
60 miles is often the length of a training ride for a CAT 4 racer during the “building the base” phase of winter training. Eating well in the morning - both carbs and protein before you go out on that kind of a ride is important. But eating and drinking during the dang endless ride is even more important.
Case in point - last weekend we had about 35 people turn out for the training ride to May Valley yesterday. To make things manageable, we broke it up into groups of 8 or so and headed out into the frosty morning. Two hours later, I noticed two little mistakes made by almost everyone. Nobody had really brought enough water. Some of the riders only had one bottle to begin with, others had two, but no one had refilled their empties at our first stop which is probably what you need to do to have enough for that kind of distance and hills.
Secondly, some of the female riders were still struggling with their fitness despite being somewhat seasoned racers. When you are new to racing, it is often a gearing issue - ie. shifting too late and having to spin weirdly to catch back on, or you are gearing too light and spinning too fast which pushes the heart rate up. But when you have been riding awhile the lack of that final uumph to get you up that hill is often a nutrition issue. Women generally have to supplement their iron intake and, since we live in Seattle, also supplement your vitamin D. Most importantly, eating enough good carbohydrates keeps your body tanked with enough glycogen for you to draw from. Here’s a link to read up on it.
Last thing about the cold - do not fear it. It is so much less boring to ride around the Lake one more time than to ride on that trainer. If it is icy, well that is a different story, get out those Lance winning the TDF for the 6500th time and do L’Alpe du Huez together until the rain washes the snow away and the road beckons for you to take the lake loop one more time. Then, base layer up and get out there.
Reader tips
- autumnrizing — what to wear - what tires to use in snow/ice etc..
- jasonkayzar Check this post from Dirt Rag Magazine re: boots, shoes and warm feet.
- UltraRob Don’t wear tight shoes. Neoprene booties or even plastic bread bags over the feet help keep feet warm. Windblocker over crotch.
- graemeshaw Don’t over dress. If you feel a bit cold when you start out, you’ll warm up, otherwise you’ll get too hot.
- velotips Put all your clothing on radiators before you get out. Start off warm - stay warm.
- Racerveza I’ve blogged a bit about it recently.
- bikeride Tip: Get those instant heat toe warmers to put in your shoes. Welcome to the cold of New England.
- KarlOnSea After today’s experience … my top cold weather tip is to avoid black ice! Rule #1: Keep rubber side down.
- statonjr Stress importance of drinking fluids, even in cold weather.
- jasper9 saw a decent post that described what the dude wears at each temperature, very helpful.
Photo credits:
Eleni op de fiets — Sophie Teunissen; Beard-off week 6.5 — nanobiker; Trailing stars behind her — Jeremyhughes
Today’s Headlines
- Detroit Bailout Deal Imminent; Bush Would Appoint Car Czar (NYT, AP)
- Tom Friedman Wants Hybrid Electric Cars and a Carbon Tax (NYT)
- Building Owners' Rep Invokes Threat of Terrorism at 'Bikes in Buildings' Council Hearing (City Room)
- Fordham Road Merchants Blame Select Bus Lane for Drop in Sales (News)
- Paterson: It's Up to Albany to Save MTA (News)
- Robert Caro: Officials With Power Never Throw Their Weight Behind Transit (NYT)
- Ravitch's Payroll Tax Would Hit State and City Budgets (Post)
- Dodging Hazards on the Kent Ave Bike Lane (Gothamist)
- Brooklyn Judges Parking in Ped Plaza Until Official Lot Inside Columbus Park Is Finished (Bklyn Paper)
- Stimulus Suggestion: Increase Transit Service (Yglesias)
- Seatless Subway Cars Debut in Boston (News)
December 8, 2008
The Buttered Gnocchi
This is from an entertaining review by Toni Bentley on a book about Casanova, called Actor Lover Priest Spy by Ian Kelly:
His dabblings with cabalism, women above his station (as the son of an actress), gambling and endless con games made him a person of constant suspicion. He was sentenced to five years in prison without a trial.
Incarcerated in the upper level of the Doge’s Palace, he began his famous escape, after nine months of imprisonment, by digging a hole under his bed at night, toward Tintoretto’s “Paradiso,” below, with an iron spike he had smuggled into his room, honed to a point and hidden in his chair. Only days before his planned escape, he was moved to a new cell and the hole was discovered.
Housed in a different part of the prison, he joined forces with a renegade monk and smuggled the spike to his clerical friend in the spine of a huge Bible, camouflaged under an enormous plate of gnocchi “swimming in butter” — an optical diversion, for the prison busboy, from the spike, which protruded one inch on either end of the Bible. If commedia dell’arte had not already been invented, the buttered gnocchi, alone, would have done it. The monk dug through his ceiling and broke through to Casanova’s cell; the two climbed onto the roof of the Doge’s Palace under a full moon. They scrambled across the roof and back down into the building through a skylight. Many ladders and bedsheet ropes later, they found themselves free but locked in with the Tintoretto. (Prison escape just isn’t the cultural experience it used to be.) Disguised, they made their way out of the building at dawn in full view and grabbed the nearest gondola for a speedy getaway. They parted company, and Casanova, exhausted, ended up having a good long sleep at the house of the local police chief, who was out looking for the escaped prisoners. Casanova was not allowed to return to Venice for almost 18 years, and when he did he wept.
it sounded just like this
it sounded just like this
CPAN Testers gives module authors new flexibility
The CPAN Testers group do some pretty cool work. According to the group itself, they are
... a group of over 100 volunteers who test as much of CPAN as possible across a plethora of Perl versions and operating systems, which is usually many more environments than authors have available to themselves.
Don't write for Windows, and don't have access to a Windows VM courtesy of Microsoft? At least the CPAN Testers will send you the error report from a failed attempt to build on Windows.
The downside of CPAN Testers is that you may not care about certain configurations. If one of the CPAN Testers mistakenly tries to build Win32::OLE on a Mac system, the author of Win32::OLE isn't going to be very interested. Along those same lines, if your module for Perl 5.8 doesn't degrade nicely for 5.6 or earlier, then you're going to get error reports as well.
Now, the CPAN Testers site gives authors flexibility in how they'd like to tests on their modules reported. I can specify which types of reports (pass, fail, NA, etc) I get, and on which versions of Perl I'm interested. I can set up a default profile and then set up per-distribution profiles as well.
It's fantastic. Anyone who is doing CPAN modules should take a look at this excellent service and its new customizations. Thanks to the CPAN Testers for making it available.
Happy Repeal Day
(via )
Are We Courting a Populist Backlash?
The government is doing a lousy job helping distressed homeowners. And according to John Dugan, the Comptroller of the Currency, the little that's been done has had surprisingly little effect. Nearly 36 percent of homeowners holding mortgages whose terms were adjusted to give them more leeway defaulted on payments within three months, and almost 53 percent were behind on payments by six months.
What's going on? It's hard to know for sure, because the homeowners who have qualified for help so far were supposed to have been fairly good credit risks to begin with. My guess is the worsening economy is making it harder for just about all homeowners to pay their mortgages, and those who were teetering on the edge months ago -- although perhaps good credit risks before that time -- are now way under water. Two of the biggest culprits: Layoffs and fewer working hours. With far less money coming in, more and more people have to choose between paying their mortgages and trying to keep up with larger and larger credit card debt. They're trying to manage both while paying the medical bills and the food bills and energy bills, and they can't make it.
It wouldn't surprise me if many of these Americans were starting to look at the size of the bailouts of Wall Street and the bailout of the Big Three -- at the executives, well-paid professional employees, upscale creditors and shareholders, and even well-paid blue-collar workers, who are the major beneficiaries of this federal largesse -- and conclude that a fundamental principle of fairness is being violated.
These Americans aren't revolutionaries. To the contrary, they're deeply conservative. They've worked hard, but their hard work hasn't paid off. Some have tried to save, only to see their savings disappear. They're worried about the future and about their kids' futures. They never expected anything like this.
This is the angry soil in which populist backlashes can take root.
Wall of Sound
MBV at Roseland. Taken by Janelle.
Marlow & Daughters: Marlow & Sons' new butcher shop,...
Marlow & Sons' new butcher shop, Marlow & Daughters, makes it onto Food & Wine's "Restaurant Trends to Watch" list (the trend here is chefs butchering their own meat) in next month's issue. A call to the restaurant reveals that the butcher shop, at 95 Broadway in South Williamsburg, should be open by next Wednesday [F&W via Grub Street]
Taking the Holidays Seriously and having fun doing it...
I wish we had photos of getting our Christmas Tree and bringing it back home. We chose one of the coldest windiest of nights to "go pick one up", which is a lot easier said than done when you have you, your wife, your two legs and arms and hands and the New York City subway system.
Don't get me wrong, it was fun, but it was a lot more challenging than I thought it would be about three hours earlier after we'd finished straitening out our apartment to prepare it for a tree. We had talked about maybe getting a tree this year, but at some point I decided, yea, if we can do a full-blown Thanksgiving dinner for our family, than hell yea we're ready to put up our first Christmas Tree. Despite being highly allergic, I was a big pusher for it.
I was thinking back to all the fond years of sitting around the tree that one day a year, after we'd all put in something to decorating it, and filling up the area around it with beautifully wrapped gifts and it was came back to that sharing, that sharing spirit. Everyone in the house contributes something to the tree, and everyone receives something from it, and even if we can't afford it, or to put anything under it, its worth it because it gives you something. It lends an exciting emotional atmosphere to a household. It makes things feel vibrant and alive, if only for a few weeks. That's something we all need this year.
So, we bought our tree last night. We found it on the corner of Court St. and Atlantic Ave. in Brooklyn. we sort of picked out the tree we wanted, and headed off to go eat first.
This part of Atlantic Ave. is renowned for its Middle Eastern restaurants, butchers, and groceries. We picked the Yemen Cafe. Yay! Salta! I chose the Lamb Salta, and Man 'o Man, that was the most perfect meal for a cold winter's night. Stone baked bread, slow roasted lamb, lamb soup and a nice crisp iceberg salad dressed with a salsa like dressing. Everything had a little spicy edge to eat and everything was perfect. We loved it and its my lunch today. The bill was forty eight bucks and there was enough food for 4.
So, the meal there got our bellies ready for the journey ahead. We set out to get lights and a few ornaments first. We walked past a the new Urban Outfitters and saw some cool glass ornaments and picked up a few boxes of those, just to get our tree some ornaments to start, then we dropped off at CVS and bought a box of lights and some hooks.
Next, we tromped back to the tree sales area we liked best and picked out a nice 6 + foot tree and then headed back to Jay street to head home. Longest walk ever. Or at least that is what it felt lugging a tree back to the subway, but we made it there and then made it back home.
Tracie popped out for some more milk and with the helpful and welcome aid of hot cocoa we put up the tree and hung the lights and the first ornaments. We think it looks pretty cool.
But we want more, we want to add our own handmade ornaments and hopefully start a lifetime of fun. Today, I searched the web and found a few helpful links, one of my favorites at mademagazine.com, led me to my first ornament that I just completed a little bit ago. Woohoo! DIY ornaments are cool.
The first finished ornament:
HTTP Client - Mac Developer Tool for HTTP Debugging
Todd Ditchendorf: HTTP Client is a “Mac OS X Leopard developer tool for debugging HTTP services by graphically creating & inspecting complex HTTP messages.”
Looks quite useful — great for folks doing any kind of hybrid apps.
Write your tests before you fix the bugs: A shining example from PHP
I went to upgrade our PHP install today, but found that:
PHP 5.2.7 has been removed from distribution
Due to a security bug found in the PHP 5.2.7 release, it has been removed from distribution. The bug affects configurations where
magic_quotes_gpcis enabled, because it remains off even when set to on. In the meantime, use PHP 5.2.6 until PHP 5.2.8 is later released.This is one of those cases of "you write a test for anything that has ever gone wrong." If the PHP guys have any clue at all, they will have written many tests of all the possible ways that
magic_quotes_gpccan get set incorrectly, before fixing a single line of source code.(For those unfamiliar with this peculiar misfeature of PHP,
magic_quotes_gpclets you automagically instantiate global variables based on GET and POST variables, which allows bad guys to muck with your code by passing in parameters that they know will mess with your code when turned into globals.)
Florent Body Snatcher R & L Reopening this Week
Meatpacking District: We thought this day would never come. R&L Restaurant—the operation that opened in the dearly departed Florent space just days after the icon closed, only to be shuttered by the Department of Health for months—is set to reopen as soon as this Wednesday, but "definitely this week," according to a worker at the restaurant. Careful followers of the story will remember that the city turned off Florent's gas weeks before the shutter, and when the DOH came to inspect R&L, they found they were using their own butane tanks, the cause for the four month shutter. Since then, the worker tells us, they've simply been waiting on the gas company to come and get the building going again, stating "The gas company does inspections when they feel like doing inspections."
They finally got their hook up last Monday, received approval from the DOH last Friday, and are now focusing on getting the food ready for the opening. They'll start with breakfast, lunch and dinner (opening at 7 a.m.) and will eventually move to staying open 24 hours on Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays. We have a feeling this saga isn't over, so we'll be keeping an eye on how she does during her re-debut.
· R&L Spot Check: Still Down Three Months Later [~E~]
· DOH Chronicles: R&L Restaurant Taken Down; "Come Back Next Week" [~E~]
· All R&L and Florent Coverage [~E~]
Relief Pitcher: Mets asking too much for Heilman
“Aaron Heilman has been a trade target this winter by the Rockies, but they deemed the price too high,’ reports the Denver Post, according to a source close to the talks.
…as i wrote yesterday, the Mets are still very much involved in talks with the Rockies for street, in a deal that would
include heilman…i believe a deal can be worked out, as they really like street…my guess is the Mets prefer to trade a player like Mike Carp, while the Rockies may be asking for a player like Nick Evans…
…that said, based on previous reports, such a deal may need to wait until the Rockies can sign or trade for a left-handed set up man, who isn’t named Pedro Feliciano…
Last month, Colorado asked for Feliciano, in addition to Heilman, from the Mets in a deal for Street, but the Mets declined, according to report from Joel Sherman in the New York Post.
…frankly, if i were the Mets, i would just do the heilman-feliciano deal, get street and keep Scott Schoeneweis, who can then return to being a lefty-specialist…
Marko joins Dopplr
Dopplr BlogDopplr appoints Marko Ahtisaari as CEO
Today we're announcing a new addition to the Dopplr team. Marko Ahtisaari will be joining us as CEO, while Lisa Sounio will continue on the board as Chairman. We're very excited about this news. For the details, here's our press release in full.
Marko is a founding investor in Dopplr and super-qualified as a professional manager, artist and web savvy product person. I think this is a great addition to the Dopplr team and as an investor, this makes me happy. ;-)
Good luck Marko and the Dopplr team.
Keanu Reeves to Star in Chef Movie
"A Michelin-level chef tries to make a comeback from major personal issues. He gathers his old friends together as his ‘dream team’ and ends up falling in love with the newest member of the group.” Whoa or no, folks? Whoa or no? [Reaching New Depths
Beth B. sent me this, from SoVintage Patterns. Now, THOSE are pockets, yes?
I'm pretty sure that they don't really go all the way to the hem, but are, instead, given a kind of apple-pie-bed treatment. Right? Otherwise I see a LOT of things going through the wash that shouldn't go through the wash ...
And I don't know about you, but I think those buttons are overkill. Giant pockets, center zipper, AND button trim? Girlfriend is trying a bit too hard. (Plus, I think she's only pretending to read. That book is too far away and I have a sneaking suspicion it's upside-down. It seems odd that all the lines would be right-justified ...)
Oh, and thank you all SO much for your wonderful response to last week's charity drive kickoff! We're already nearly halfway to the goal of $1500 for Books Through Bars ... and I forgot to mention the end date, which, this year, will be Epiphany. (Seemed appropriate, and if money's tight before the holidays, if gives you a little longer to donate ...) A few folks have had trouble with the Network For Good widget interface, so I'm going to ask Books Through Bars if they have alternate avenues ... Overseas/UK folks *can* use the widget (which asks for state/zip code) by putting their equivalent geographic locations/postal codes in those fields, btw. Don't forget to put "Dress A Day" in the "Dedication" field so that we can track the donations ... to donate TODAY, click here. When you get your receipt, forward it to me, since one lucky donor have a character named after him or her in my forthcoming novel, "The Secret Lives of Dresses"!
December 7, 2008
Percona team at Turkey
Being completely distributed team, meetings are very important for us and this time we went to the Turkey in the end of October (yes, yes I could be faster with sharing photos)
This went we went to Turkey, Antalya region, which is a destination which is very easy to reach from Europe as well as offering great all inclusive deals in the end of the season.
Same as last year we had all spouses/girlfriends and spouses and kids invited to join. I think this was a great tradition of early days MySQL, which Monty and David came up with. Among other things they would finally believe there is a real job real company and real team mates you work with
This year we also missed few guys from the team meeting which had to stay home due to various reason but this is surely majority of the team.
It is fun to compare this picture to one from Egypt taken a year ago:
We got significantly more people and more Spouses and kids could come this time.
Here are some more pictures posted by Tom Basil.
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New Google Map Utilities Enhance the User Experience
Shared by Bud
A good roundup of tools to help with Google maps mashups
Take a look at our API directory and you will quickly note that the Google Maps API continues to reign as the most popular API used for mashups. As the API continues to gain momentum, several new utilities have emerged to improve the user experience (or UX as it has come to be known).
First up is GeoStart, a startup from the Netherlands, which has open-sourced two helper utilities to the Google Maps open-source utility library: ProgressBar Control and SnapToRoute. The ProgressBar Control creates a status bar that shows the progress of markers being added and removed from the map. SnapToRoute lets you snap a marker to the closest point on a polyline, ensuring that the marker is always somewhere on the line. [via Google Geo Developers Blog]
Next up is a new marker clustering utility from Mapeed, which uses a fast clustering algorithm for the display of high data volume maps. The Mapeed Marker Fusion plugin is offered as software-as-a-service (SAAS) with both free and commercial licenses. Marker Fusion can be used to display up to 50,000 records as clustered markers, and the service includes a JavaScript API that can be used to integrate your data with the service. [via Google Maps Mania]
Mapeed also just got some good press by building CrunchVision, a slick map mashup on top of the CrunchBase API.
We are excited about these new utilities, and we’re looking forward to seeing the innovative ways that developers will use these in the ever-growing number of map mashups out there.
Backpup
Awwww, isn't that kee-yoot? That lady's got one of those novelty backpacks ...
... you know, the kind that look just like a ... just like a ...
a ... a ...
I'm speechless, A. S.
Not Going Well
A very disquieting -- maybe just even more disquieting -- article from the Journal on the India-Pakistan conflict. Tensions spiked when India's foreign ministry called Pakistani President Zardari with a "bellicose" message at the height of the Mumbai seige. But now the two countries are arguing back and forth over whether it was actually a crank call from a prankster -- a lack of clear lines of communication which could lead to some rather unpleasant misunderstandings.
No, that doesn't inspire a lot of confidence.
Then there's this.
A top [Pakistani] security official has said the military would be willing to fight India alongside Pakistani Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud, the man accused of assassinating former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto. Mr. Mehsud has denied involvement in the murder. The Taliban, too, said it would suspend its fight against Pakistani soldiers to join them a conflict with India.
New Day
Obama on those factory workers occupying their factory in Chicago, demanding their benefits and pay. "When it comes to the situation here in Chicago with the workers who are asking for their benefits and payments they have earned, I think they are absolutely right. What's happening to them is reflective of what's happening across this economy."
Extra, Extra
Photograph of the HSBC Building on Fifth Avenue by Alan Cordova on Flickr
- From the Gothamist Newsmap: A school bus MVA at 40th St & 9th Ave in Manhattan, a perp search at Farmers Blvd & 145th Ave in Queens, and an animal condition on Halsey St in Brooklyn.
- A tearful O.J. Simpson was sentenced to at least nine years in prison for the kidnapping and robbery of two sports memorabilia dealers in Las Vegas.
- A NY soldier was acquitted of the bombing deaths of two superiors in Iraq (he allegedly placed a mine in the window of their room). One of the superiors' widows yelled after the verdict was read, "He slaughtered our husbands and that's it?"
- Someone bought the supposedly haunted house on Joralemon Street for almost $5 million. The landmarked, four-bedroom townhouse was recently restored.
- A man claimed he was being pursued by the Russian mob, hence his banging on cars and a school bus and eventually carjacking one vehicle.
- The FAA is going ahead with its plans to auction off takeoff and landing slots at JFK, LaGuardia and Newark Airports--even though the Port Authority which operates the airports hates the idea.
- Though its owners were arrested for wage violations, Saigon Grill business is still bustling.
- Obama speechwriter Jon Favreau loves posing with Hillary Clinton when she's a cardboard cutout.
- Sigourney Weaver will meet with Bill Murray to discuss possibly being in...Ghostbusters 3.
Semiotics of the Kitchen
Semiotics of the Kitchen
Meant to post this before in honor of Finn’s party preparations.
Not My Gorilla
Developer Jamis Buck, on why he’s no longer concerned about Windows compatibility for Capistrano, his remote server automation tool:
Something has to give. In this case (and among other things), it’s Windows. Microsoft may be an 800 lb. gorilla, but it’s not my gorilla, and it’s not in my room. If you need to appease the gorilla, that is (with all due respect) not my problem.
This was in response to message that concluded with, “I am no fan of Microsoft, but, like it or not, they are the 800 lb. gorilla in the room.”
Similarly, I no longer concern myself with how Daring Fireball renders in Internet Explorer. It’s easier for me to ignore IE because the DF audience predominantly uses Safari, Firefox, and MobileSafari (roughly 53, 25, and 8 percent, respectively, with IE coming in around 4 percent). I have no idea whether the DF Paraphernalia store is even legible under IE, because I didn’t even bother to check. It almost certainly doesn’t look “right”. I crafted the CSS using Safari, then checked it in Firefox, and I called it done.
There are a lot of people who’d be a lot happier if they stopped worrying about other people’s 800 pound gorillas.
Chicago Workers Occupy Factory!
I am very excited that this is happening...
Idled Workers Occupy Factory in ChicagoBy RUPA SHENOY AP
December 6, 2008CHICAGO - Outraged and determined Chicago factory workers who were abruptly laid off this week have occupied their former workplace and say they won't leave until they get the severance and vacation pay they say they're owed.
The employees say they received three days notice their plant was closing. In the second day of a sit-in on the factory floor Saturday, about 250 union workers occupied the building in shifts while union leaders outside criticized a Wall Street bailout they say is leaving laborers behind.
About 50 workers sat on pallets and chairs inside the Republic Windows and Doors plant, supplied with donated food, sleeping bags and blankets. Leah Fried, an organizer with the United Electrical Workers, said the Chicago-based vinyl window manufacturer failed to give its 300 employees the 60 days' notice required by law before shutting.
During the takeover, workers have been shoveling snow and cleaning the building, Fried said.
"We're doing something we haven't done since the 1930s, so we're trying to make it work," Fried said.
She said the company can't pay employees because its creditor, Charlotte, N.C.-based Bank of America, won't let them. Crain's Chicago Business reported that Republic Windows' monthly sales had fallen to $2.9 million from $4 million during the past month. In a memo to the union, obtained by the business journal, Republic CEO Rich Gillman said the company had "no choice but to shut our doors."
Bank of America received $25 billion from the government's financial bailout package. The company said in a statement to news outlets Saturday that it isn't responsible for Republic's financial obligations to its employees.
Representatives of Republic Windows did not immediately respond Saturday to calls and e-mails seeking comment.
"Across cultures, religions, union and nonunion, we all say this bailout was a shame," said Richard Berg, president of Teamsters Local 743. "If this bailout should go to anything, it should go to the workers of this country."
Outside the plant, protesters wore stickers and carried signs that said, "You got bailed out, we got sold out."
Larry Spivack, regional director for American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, Council 31, said the peaceful action will add to Chicago's rich history in the labor movement, which includes the deadly 1886 Haymarket affair, when Chicago laborers and anarchists gathering in a square on the city's West Side drew national attention when an unidentified person threw a bomb at police.
"The history of workers is built on issues like this here today," Spivack said.
Police spokeswoman Laura Kubiak said authorities were aware of the situation and officers were patrolling the area.
Workers were angered when company officials didn't show up for a meeting Friday arranged by U.S. Rep. Luis Gutierrez, a Chicago Democrat, Fried said. Union officials said another meeting with the company is scheduled for Monday afternoon.
"We're going to stay here until we win justice," said Blanca Funes, 55, of Chicago, after occupying the building for several hours.
Speaking in Spanish, Funes said she fears losing her home without the wages she feels she's owed. A 13-year employee of Republic, she estimated her family can make do for three months without her paycheck.
Most of the factory's workers are Hispanic.
Moving forward with Git and Perl
By Nadim Khemir
Perl is very often used as glue to quickly put together a functionality by using already existing components. This is a great use of Perl. Still, I believe that we made a mistake, a few years ago, when we kept being the glue instead for also becoming part of the componnents; this is one of the main reason Python took off, developers learned Python, an otherwise excellent language, to control and integrate into their favorite applications while Perl was still on the outside. I wish Perl was an intrinsic part of more applications.
Among the applications that have Perl bindings, Git is a very interesting one. There is a lot of interest for Git in the Perl community. This is partly due to Perl 5's source code going over to Git.
Pages like this on the Perl 5 wiki tell us that "Like Perl, Git has lots of flexbility, TIMTOWTDI" this matches The way most Perl developers think and may be why a lot of Perl developers are switching to Git. Git is easy to learn. Simple things are simple and complicated things possible. Rings a bell? There are many Perl developers involved in Git. Randal Schwartz even made a presentation on git, and we've seen articles here on Mechanix.
And there are multiple modules on CPAN to handle Git-related functionality. The Git community itself has a Git.pm module that is part of the Git distribution. Git.pm needed some love and I am taking over its maintenance. My hope is to help the Git community and the Perl community as well.
What's in it for the Git and Perl community?
- Involvement of the Perl community in the Perl component distributed with Git
- A closer cooperation.
- Making Perl developer aware of version control systems.
- Unify, if wished for, the multiple Git modules of CPAN (other are under construction but not on CPAN yet), this would be better for maintenance and for the users.
- Not directly related but a wish, a CPAN with better versioning strategy.
- What you need (but you have to tell us. I'll be happy to get input from the Perl community, at nkh@cpan.org, in the form of comments, and patches)
Jakub Narebski has written an RFC for the Perl bindings for the Perl bindings. This is an excellent stating point.
Nadim Khemir is a technical manager and architect at Ericsson Mobile Platform in Sweden. His favorite subjects are process automation and build systems. He can be contacted at nkh@cpan.org and is often seen on #perl-qa.
TPMTV: A Chat With Paul Krugman
October 10 2008...
Post-2003 Yanks Starting Pitching Scorecard
Playing around with Baseball-Reference.com’s Play Index Pitching Season Finder, I asked it to show me, since 2004, how many Yankees pitchers have posted a season where they appeared in at least 28 games, with 90% of them being starts, and had an ERA+ of 110 (or greater) on the season. Here’s that list:
From To Ages Seasons +-----------------+----+----+-----+-------+ Chien-Ming Wang 2006 2007 26-27 2 Mike Mussina 2006 2008 37-39 2 Andy Pettitte 2007 2007 35-35 1 Randy Johnson 2005 2005 41-41 1 Seasons/Careers found: 4.That’s it. In the last five years the Yankees have only had four starting pitchers to have “very good” seasons - and, in total, these four have authored six such seasons.
Think about that for a moment. Assume that, in a perfect world, you had 5 starting pitchers in your rotation and each of them never missed a turn. That means you would have 5 “starting seasons” per year. Now, multiply that by five seasons (from 2004 through 2008). That’s twenty-five.
So, in this department, the Yankees have gone 6 for 25 - or a percentage of 24%. Sounds bad, right?
Well, check out the Boston Red Sox, using the same filters, since 2004:
From To Ages Seasons +-----------------+----+----+-----+-------+ Curt Schilling 2004 2006 37-39 2 Tim Wakefield 2008 2008 41-41 1 Daisuke Matsuzaka 2008 2008 27-27 1 Jon Lester 2008 2008 24-24 1 Josh Beckett 2007 2007 27-27 1 Pedro Martinez 2004 2004 32-32 1 Bronson Arroyo 2004 2004 27-27 1Seasons/Careers found: 7.Boston, over this time, has posted 8 such seasons (from 7 pitchers). So, the Red Sox are at 32%.This makes me think that we should lower that ERA+ bar. What happens if we move it to an ERA+ of 100 (or greater)? Here are those results:
From To Ages Seasons +-----------------+----+----+-----+-------+ Chien-Ming Wang 2006 2007 26-27 2 Mike Mussina 2006 2008 37-39 2 Andy Pettitte 2007 2007 35-35 1 Jaret Wright 2006 2006 30-30 1 Randy Johnson 2005 2005 41-41 1 Seasons/Careers found: 5.From To Ages Seasons +-----------------+----+----+-----+-------+ Tim Wakefield 2004 2008 37-41 4 Daisuke Matsuzaka 2007 2008 26-27 2 Curt Schilling 2004 2006 37-39 2 Bronson Arroyo 2004 2005 27-28 2 Jon Lester 2008 2008 24-24 1 Josh Beckett 2007 2007 27-27 1 David Wells 2005 2005 42-42 1 Pedro Martinez 2004 2004 32-32 1 Seasons/Careers found: 8.Well, there it is, huh? Since 2004, the Yankees have had just 7 “solid” seasons from a starting pitcher (coming from 5 starters) whereas the Red Sox have had 14 “solid” seasons from a starting pitcher (coming from 8 starters).
This puts the Yankees at 28% for a success rate whereas the Red Sox have a success rate of 56% over the same period of time. Do the math on that one - it’s double.
So, if you want to know why the Red Sox have two World Series rings since 2004 and the Yankees have zero, part of the reason is the fact that Boston (and their front office) has lapped the Yankees (and their front office) in terms of identifying and retaining quality starting pitching.
And, unless the Yankees organization can close this front office efficiency gap with respect to filling out a starting rotation, don’t expect New York to catch up to Boston, any time soon, in that ring tally board.
Read: Q&A with Original Mr. Met
Recently, I sat down with Dan Reilly, the original Mr. Met.
Our conversation was truly a step back into Mets history, and thanks to Mr. Reilly’s first person accounts, I felt like I had been there myself.
Reilly’s new book, “The Original Mr. Met Remembers: When The Miracle Began,” is a must read for Mets fans of any age and can be found at iUniverse.com.
Regis Courtemanche: So I have to ask, were you allowed to talk when in costume?
Dan Reilly: “No, no, the Mets just wanted me to wave alot and go up to all the kids. I could never take the head off or anything. I even walked the entire Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade alongside Elsie the Borden’s Cow with that head on.”
Regis Courtemanche: Was it hot in there?
Dan Reilly: Oh, it was terrible (laughs). I have no idea where that head is now but would like to.
Regis Courtemanche: Whose idea was it to have a mascot?
Dan Reilly: We always had the cartoon character Mr. Met in the Polo Grounds, and it carried into Shea Stadium. I was an usher then, and also sold tickets - which we actually counted - at Grand Central for Bob Mandt… Tom Meany, the Mets first PR Director noticed so many kids at the games, and thought we should have a live Mr. Met. So, him and Jim Thompson called me into the office and I thought it was curtains. They asked if I’d be interested. I said I don’t dance or anything but ‘yeah, I’m game.’ In May of ‘64, we picked a doubleheader against the Giants and I came out in the second game.
Regis Courtemanche: What was the inspiration for the book?
Dan Reilly: Well, I love sharing stories and memories. My wife then really pushed me to do the book. Everyone said, just write down a story here and there, and eventually you’ll have a book. And eventually, I did. Regis, I have so many stories from back then I could probably write a few more. I feel like if we hadn’t
won in ‘69 though, no one would remember us. That’s why I wrote the book.
Regis Courtemanche: What was the vibe in the clubhouse like back then?
Dan Reilly: Such a great group of guys, I really miss them. Everything was a party. Three-game winning streak? That’s a party. One night, Tug [McGraw] just beat Sandy Koufax and we were supposed to meet up with the guys at the Diamond Club to celebrate. Well, the World’s Fair was occuring right in the park, and Tug really wanted to go to the Irish Pavillion first. I could see trouble coming and needless to say, we never made it back to Shea.
Regis Courtemanche: Who were your best friends on the team?
Dan Reilly: They were all really great, but Tug and Swoboda. I lived with Swoboda, Kranepool, those were my guys. I miss them a lot.
Regis Courtemanche: What were your best and worst moments?
Dan Reilly: Oh no worst, no worst. But I really liked Christmas time. We’d all visit the hospitals and say hi to everyone. I can recall the highlights of every year I worked with the Mets from ‘64-’73. I was Mr. Met for three.
Regis Courtemanche: How do you feel about Shea being replaced.
Dan Reilly: Well, it’s sad. That was home, we were there easily 16 hours a day. Baseball’s much bigger now. It was a small organization then, everyone knew and liked each other. I miss those days and hope some of them miss me.
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