randomwalks/dj

A while back, I stumbled upon an article by Freeman Dyson on Carl Woese. Carl Woese is a long time scientist studying the origins of life and revolutionized thinking around early life, microbiology, and phylogeny.

Freeman Dyson's article is a great overview of the discussions around pre- and post-Darwinian evolution*. Darwinian evolution is what we are used to, a standard "fight for survival" of non-interbreeding species that slowly evolve their fitness to the challenges in the environment.

What really flipped me was Dyson discussing pre-Darwinian evolution, an idea postulated by Carl Woese back in 2004 in an article titled "A New Biology for a New Century." The thought is that early life was a time of promiscuous gene swapping. That, as I see it, an organism was a sack of molecules and genes that worked together to propagate a collection of "features." Then, at some point (Woese suggests at least three) an organism stopped, found a good set of genes, and brought this lateral gene transfer down to a trickle. And there you have a "species."

The three times Woese mentions were the times that gave rise to Archaebacteria, Bacteria, and everyone else. This free mix and match with a sudden stop makes sense of why there are three large groups of cell structures, yet that they are related in some way.

This idea really hit home for me when listening to Penny Chisholm, a microbiologist, talking about Prochlorococcus on Science Friday. This small cyanobacteria might be the most abundant photosynthetic organism, but Chisholm and colleagues only discovered it in the 80s.

What was interesting was her answer about different species of Prochlorococcus: she called them "genomic variants."

This ties back to what Woese was implying about lateral gene transfer and pre-Darwinian evolution and sacks of organisms with a collection of genes. If all organisms are in the possibility-space of all arrangements of genetic elements, then a particular strain of organism would be a peak of variation in that particular area of arrangement of genetic elements (but still part of a continuum of possibility-space).

Micro-organisms still do a lot of gene transfer (witness the spread of antibiotic resistance across species). But I suppose at some level they mix up everything and can have a large amount of variation across a single species. Hence, Chisholm's observation that Prochlorococcus species are best viewed as variants than distinct species. Promiscuous lateral gene transfer across Prochlorococcus "species" deflates the definition of species as non-interbreeding organisms.

As microbial biology has a renaissance due to the rise of synthetic biology (humans effecting lateral gene transfer in micro-organisms at a scale we haven't done before), understanding "speciation" in terms of "genetic variants" will go a long way in understanding how and what genes are to be used.

*Dyson also compares the way cultures laterally transfer as the post-Darwinian era.

Image from If you dream it...

Originally posted by charlie from Lifeblog, on January 3, 2009 11:44 PM

    

    

In early December, Heather blogged about the discussions in Flickr Central for group members to post what they think are their best shots and videos from 2008. Well, a lot of Flickr members have come forth with some great work. Here are a few from the photos thread. You can follow the rest of that discussion here.

Photos from exrorro, laanba, Gabo Morales, *Marni* and thesylvia.       

Originally posted by Kevin Collins from Flickr Blog, on January 3, 2009 8:41 PM

Filed under: Macworld

This is how you know you're an Apple fan: AppleInsider's pictures of covered banners at Moscone Center make you desperately want to know what's on them.

Five 60-foot banners grace the South hall, while Apple's booth on the expo floor has massive banners hanging from the ceiling, hidden behind black cloth.

AppleInsider also has pictures of the mobile production studio that will handle Tuesday's keynote presentation. Inside, you can see engineers setting up camera angles and making finishing touches for Phil Schiller's talk.

The keynote presentation begins Tuesday, January 6 at 9 a.m. Pacific Time (noon Eastern), but TUAW's coverage will begin early that morning. If you're interested in drinking from the firehose of Macworld news from the show floor, feel free to follow Twitter user @tuaw_mwsf09. (Otherwise, our regular Twitter stream, @tuaw, will remain at a moderate volume.)

TUAWShrouded Macworld banners ready for Tuesday originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Sat, 03 Jan 2009 19:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Originally posted by Robert Palmer from The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW), on January 3, 2009 2:00 PM

Today's events in Minnesota make it appear that a Norm Coleman victory is now pretty much impossible -- and it just so happens to have occurred on the day his Senate term officially expired. A nice extra touch.

Election officials today counted through about 950 absentee ballots that both campaigns agreed had been wrongly rejected, completing the recount unless there is any new court intervention. The result: Al Franken's paper-thin lead of 49 votes has now jumped to 225 votes -- way beyond what most people crunching the numbers expected, based on the geographic spread of the newly-counted ballots.

With these new figures, it's worth examining just how slim the odds would be of Coleman finding some way to win this thing, should he follow through on his campaign's vow to challenge the result in court.

First, there's Coleman's claim that 25 selected precincts double-counted a bunch of absentee votes for Franken, netting Franken about 110 votes. During the recount, the state Supreme Court ruled that Coleman could only raise this issue after the recount concluded and an apparent winner was determined. But if courts agree with him on that and took those votes away from Franken, Coleman would still lose. Then there's the canvassing board's decision to restore to Franken a net total of 46 votes that went missing from a single precinct during the recount. Coleman's campaign has indicated that they plan to contest that decision, but winning on it would still have him behind.

One other thing: The burden of proof in any legal arguments will be on Coleman, with the assumption going in that Franken's victory was legitimate. And even if he won both of the two issues above, he'd still be almost one hundred votes behind.

What options does he have left? Coleman's only hope would be to win on his campaign's latest efforts to restart this phase of the recount and force the counting of about 650 rejected absentee ballot envelopes from red precincts, which the local officials say were tossed properly. An affidavit from a Hennepin County election official shows the Coleman campaign hasn't even supplied reasons to look at these ballots, and election officials in multiple counties, including Ramsey county, Pipestone County and others all say they've been taking the time to review the Coleman list, and they stand by their decisions.

The Coleman campaign still seems likely to file an election contest, challenging this result in court. This would bottle up Franken's victory for weeks or even months, and delay Al Franken from being able to take his seat in the Senate. But at this point it's difficult to see how they could have much of a leg to stand on. It really does look like Al Franken's lead is insurmountable.

Originally posted by Eric Kleefeld from TPM Election Central, on January 3, 2009 1:54 PM

Steven Levy:

It’s the 25th anniversary of the Apple Macintosh, but Steve Jobs’ eyes are dry. At the company headquarters in Silicon Valley, where he was presenting a set of new laptops to the press last October, I mentioned the birthday to him. Jobs recoiled at any suggestion of nostalgia. “I don’t think about that,” he said. “When I got back here in 1997, I was looking for more room, and I found an archive of old Macs and other stuff. I said, ‘Get it away!’ and I shipped all that shit off to Stanford. If you look backward in this business, you’ll be crushed. You have to look forward.”

I think this attitude is one of the keys to Jobs’s long-term success.

(Via Chris Foresman.)

 ★ 

Originally posted by John Gruber from Daring Fireball, on January 3, 2009 12:36 PM

Back in May 2008, I was on top of the world. Viewers were soaring for my newly launched Yahoo show, TechTicker, my book was about to come out and was boasting a beautifully low three-digit Amazon rank, several of my BusinessWeek columns had been among the most read stories on the site, and traffic on this blog was doubling month-over-month. (Sure it had only been open two months, but details like that don't matter when you're on top of the world.)

I was also in New York doing a slew of press interviews for the launch of my book. Not even a torrent of rain and a wind storm that eviscerated my umbrella could dampen my spirits as I Mary Tyler Moore'd all over Manhattan in a DVF dress feeling like I'd turned the world on with my ability to tell a great story and enviable access to people whose stories actually mattered. And let's be clear: No one had handed me all this. I had worked evenings, sleepless nights, sacrificed relationships and any kind of work/life balance for nearly a decade to get here. And, I thought, all the hard work had finally paid off.

But more than that, the synergy was paying off. The idea was that I'd become a "brand"-- and there was no paucity of data to back that up. There was also no shortage of media outlets willing to pay me to be that brand. As late in 2007 I carefully picked between them, I thought a lot about synergy. I didn't want just one platform, and I didn't want competing platforms. Rather, I picked platforms that would cross promote and jobs that would play to different strengths I had as a reporter, and alternatively challenge me more. As a journalist who has watched synergy rarely pay off when promised, the fact that I believed it would be so easy in boosting the next phase of my own career should have been a red flag.

That take-on-the-world morning, I was having coffee with Steven Levy, then of Newsweek, now of Wired, who challenged this whole idea of whether this "Sarah Lacy" brand was actually translating into things that mattered, like book sales, money, something real and tangible, or whether it was a just smokescreen of hype. And I granted his point. I've long been dubious of Internet celebrity's staying power. It seems the Internet famous hit that moment where they're on the Today Show, and just about to close a deal with ABC or HBO or pick the big money, you've-made-it acronym, but it never really materializes.

I've written before that one of the advantages of the Internet-- the relatively low barrier to click on something-- is an advantage for building brands and gaining distribution online, but it's also a disadvantage. People flock to you as a side-show, but don't actually want to invest real dollars to support whatever you are doing. Honestly, how many of Tila Tequila's million MySpace friends buy her CDs? There's a currency in mild watching-a-train-wreck-fascination and even hate online, that doesn't exist in the offline world in the same way. And, to date, it hasn't translated.

It's now a year after I started my synergy gambit, and in many ways, Levy is wrong. By any measure, I'm more successful working for myself than I was on staff for just one publication: income, name recognition, opportunities, amazing once-in-a-lifetime experiences. And, while I'm not immune, I'm safer heading into this downturn than in the past because all my income doesn't hinge on one gig. In terms of journalism, it's way more successful. I have the challenge only to find great stories and tell them. And generally any story I love, I've got a platform for it. Sometimes it's a visual story; sometimes it's a big idea story that's financially complex but perfect for a column. Frequently, stories aren't right for TechTicker or BusinessWeek, but might work for  this blog or a freelance project or maybe even (hint?) a new book. I can't tell you how freeing that is after years of laboriously pitching stories, writing stories I didn't care about and having to play the newsroom game. You can't put a price on autonomy.

But when it comes to stats, the synergy and the cross promotion hasn't been as easy as it would seem on paper. I've been pretty aggressive about linking between things, and if you follow me here or on Twitter, you get a pretty clear day-to-day account of my life. Yet, I'm stunned by how many people read this blog, but never go to TechTicker. Or how many people watch TechTicker, but have no idea I write a BusinessWeek column. Or how many people follow me on Twitter, but still think I'm on staff for BusinessWeek full-time. Or-- I swear to God-- the number of people who know me from any of those platforms and say, "You wrote a book?" If my life were a reality show, you could insert a montage of all the times I've said "my book" in the last year and it would be a mini-series in length. Whenever I get recognized and someone asks if I'm Sarah Lacy, I smile and say yes, but then coyly ask how they know me. Because I've learned it's different every time, and it's never all-of-the-above.

On the surface, this sounds great for me. I'm still leveraged across several platforms even if they aren't working together as well as I'd hoped. But doesn't it also mean that my "value" as a brand is diminished if I can't pull fans and readers across platforms? After all, it's supposed to be a two-way transaction.

So what gives? I'm still not sure. But I've got an inkling that this multi-year trend towards brand-this and brand-that in the business world may be in for a rude awakening. After all, there are far more high-profile examples. Think about Howard Stern: He used to be one of the most talked about, most hated, most beloved people in popular culture. His star power made talk radio relevant outside of a trucker cab. That fame translated to books, movies, television-- seemingly any media the self-appointed "king" touched. If anyone had real brand that could translate into cash it was Stern, and that's why Sirius radio gave him a serious ton of cash. And Stern was no lazy diva; he worked it. He was everywhere hawking those Sirius devices; calling it the new revolution in radio. He even had a cause: That the over-zealous FCC was killing freedom of speech. But as a great article in last week's Sunday New York Times showed, it just didn't translate. Worse: Stern lost his relevance in popular culture. And with it, his influence and likely his fair market value as a brand.

As the name of my book (ahem, mention 1,567,983 in the last year) belies, I think most success in business-- particularly startups-- is a hard to quantify mixture of being lucky and good. In May 2008, I think I felt I'd worked hard enough I could consider my synergy plan the result of being good. But nearly a year later, I'm starting to realize like so much else I was lucky. Lucky that I hedged entrepreneurial ventures like launching my own blog and my book (1,567,984) with two other media platforms that were bigger than I was, am or will probably ever be on my own. At the time a lot of people were asking why I still needed Yahoo or BusinessWeek, and I'm glad my ego wasn't so unchecked that I listened and bought into that smokescreen of hype. Instead, I continually told my husband, "I'm the new black for about five minutes. This isn't going to last."

I'm not saying brand doesn't matter. I'm just saying it doesn't matter the way it seems like it should on paper. In the last year, a lot of college kids or journalists young in their careers have asked my advice on becoming a brand, and I've told them there's no quick and easy hack to get there. It takes time, long hours, and consistent work of merit in your field. Brand that hits people fast, usually doesn't last. It's like building a house; it needs a good foundation. In my case, I worked for ten years as a boring, daily-grind business reporter, heads-down focused on producing good work, with nary a picture of myself on the Internet. Hype will come and go-- and I'll use it to my advantage when it's here-- but I always have that foundation. The trick is remembering I am a reporter, not a celebrity. That means any swankiness my job entails is usually the exception, not the rule. But, as a result, I am also not a flash-in-the-pan. The other thing I've told them is to know what they're getting into chasing the brand dream. No one tells you how hard it is to maintain it and to stomach all that comes with it, once you establish it.

I guess the third leg of that brand-reality-check stool is what I've learned in the last year: You don't just add water to brand for instant traffic and monetization. Just as there's no easy hack to becoming a brand, there's no easy hack to profiting from it. Put another way: You never get to coast. For another great example, check out this article about Maria Bartiromo, one of the most important pioneers and biggest brands in the cable news business who still works every bit as hard and watches over one shoulder for someone to steal her thunder. She has to. We all do.

In the last day, I've made a list of about a dozen New Years Resolutions. For me, it's a very personal process so unlike a lot of bloggers, I won't share them here. But in the wee hours of this sleepless morning, I've just added another one: To keep only a passive eye on the stats in 2009, because what matters more in taking my career to the next level is that same heads-down journalistic hard work that got me here in the first place, not how many friends, page views or links I get.

Originally posted by sarah lacy from SarahLacy.com, on January 3, 2009 6:03 AM

Here are the most strikeouts in a game by a winning team (extra innings excluded):

  Cnt Date          Tm   Opp GmReslt  PA  AB  R  H 2B 3B HR RBI BB IBB **SO** HBP SH SF ROE GDP SB CS LOB Batrs
+----+-------------+---+----+-------+---+---+--+--+--+--+--+---+--+---+------+---+--+--+---+---+--+--+---+-----+
    1 1997-06-24    OAK @SEA W  4-1   37  37  4 11  3  0  2   4  0   0   19     0  0  0   0   1  0  0   6    10
    2 1969-09-15    NYM @STL W  4-3   38  36  4  9  0  0  2   4  2   0   19     0  0  0   1   0  0  0   7    12

    3 2007-04-25    ARI  SDP W  3-2   33  29  3  4  0  0  2   3  4   0   18     0  0  0   0   0  0  0   4    12
    4 2006-05-22    ATL @SDP W  3-1   33  32  3  5  1  0  2   3  1   0   18     0  0  0   0   0  1  0   3    12
    5 2005-04-10    NYM @ATL W  6-1   42  38  6 13  3  0  3   6  2   1   18     0  2  0   1   0  2  0   9     9
    6 1997-07-13    TEX @SEA W  4-2   41  33  4  7  3  1  1   4  6   1   18     1  0  1   0   0  2  0  10    12
    7 1992-09-27    TEX  SEA W  3-2   38  31  3  7  1  0  0   3  5   1   18     0  1  1   1   0  1  0  10    14
    8 1989-07-25    TOR @TEX W  4-0   44  40  4  9  3  0  0   3  4   2   18     0  0  0   2   0  4  0  13    11

    9 2007-09-21    BOS @TBD W  8-1   45  35  8  9  1  1  3   6  6   0   17     3  1  0   0   0  1  0  10    10
   10 2003-06-26    MIL @CHC W  5-3   33  32  5  6  1  0  2   5  1   0   17     0  0  0   0   0  1  1   1    14
   11 2000-05-06    TBD @BOS W  1-0   34  33  1  6  0  0  0   1  1   0   17     0  0  0   0   0  2  0   6     9
   12 1999-09-12    OAK @TBD W  4-3   38  33  4  6  1  0  2   4  5   1   17     0  0  0   0   0  0  0   7    10
   13 1999-06-30    CIN  ARI W  2-0   30  30  2  7  0  0  1   2  0   0   17     0  0  0   0   0  2  0   4    12
   14 1998-08-29    MON @SDP W  3-1   33  33  3  6  1  0  2   3  0   0   17     0  0  0   0   0  0  0   3    12
   15 1998-05-16    CHC @CIN W  5-4   42  36  5 11  2  0  1   5  6   1   17     0  0  0   1   1  3  1  10    14
   16 1997-07-21    PIT @PHI W  3-2   34  32  3  7  1  1  2   3  1   0   17     0  1  0   0   0  1  1   4    16
   17 1997-07-05    DET  BAL W  6-5   35  30  6  8  2  0  2   5  5   1   17     0  0  0   0   0  2  1   5    13
   18 1970-05-21    PHI  STL W  4-3   37  33  4 11  1  1  1   4  3   1   17     0  1  0   0   0  0  3   7    15
   19 1968-09-18    BOS  BAL W  4-0   34  27  4  5  0  0  0   4  5   0   17     0  1  1   0   0  0  0   6    11
   20 1961-05-10    BOS @LAA W  3-2   35  34  3  6  0  0  1   3  1   0   17     0  0  0   1   0  0  0   5    11

Hey, I was actually at that Mariners game, #1. It was a pretty weird game. First of all, in the 5th inning, McGwire hit an incredible moon shot homer that went way into the upper deck in the Kingdome. It was easily the most towering homer I’ve ever seen, seemingly approaching the roof.

Secondly, everybody was aware that Johnson had a shot at the single-game (9-inning) record of 20 strikeouts, which at that time had been done just twice, both times by Roger Clemens. RJ had 15 strikeouts through 6 innnings, and it seemed that he was definitely going to break the record. In the 7th, he got the first out on a fly ball, and the home crowd booed since it was not a strikeout. Then he gave up a single and the crowd cheered, since that wasn’t an out and gave him the chance to record another K. It was crazy–the home team was cheering backwards. So what do you think happened when he got the next guy to hit into a double play to end the inning? Yep, massive booing. He was stuck on 15 K’s through 7 innings.

But then, in the 8th inning, he struck out the side (including McGwire and Canseco no less) to bring his total up to 18. That meant he needed two to tie the record and three to break it.

The Athletics game up to bat in the top of the 9th already leading the game 3-0. Scott Brosius flew out (boos heard.) George Williams homers to push the lead to 4-0, but the Mariners crowd cheers. Mark Bellhorn strikes out to give Johnson 19 K’s–massive cheering of course, which momentarily sets my brain back to normal since the home team is cheering a positive event. But then Jason McDonald lines out to end the inning. First there are massive boos, but they quickly turn to cheers to congratulate Randy on his excellent effort. I guess most fans realized at that point that the Mariners were likely to lose in the bottom of the frame, which they did.

That was an immensely fun game to attend.

Originally posted by Andy from Stat of the Day, on January 3, 2009 3:46 AM

Originally posted in ct2

I've been perplexed by the lack of serious reviews of blogs. There is no reliable evaluation of blogs as there is of say, movies, books and music. There is no where to go to hear about the best street fashion blog, say. Sure, people have favorite blogs, but there is no sensible critique or systematic recommendations of them.

For the past several years, Rex Sorgatz at Fimoculous has presented a short list of the best blogs of the year, and his annual list is the closest I've seen to a good blog review. (There are blog sites that list the top blogs, but most of these have little annotation making them weak. ) Unlike most such year-end lists, the Fimoculous Notable Blogs list is extremely well researched, intelligent, and refreshing. First of all, Sorgatz apparently reads all blogs so his perspective of the landscape is stunningly broad. Therefore, he is capable of considering a blog with similar or competitive ones. In his list he'll mention comparable sites, or blogs that "you'll like if you liked this one." He includes the well-known sites if they've had a good year, but often seeks out the marginal blog, or upstart, if they are doing something interesting.

I also like his style and find that we often converge in our approvals of blogs we read, so naturally I think his choices are smart. Every year I pick up more than a few new great reads to add to my fairly selective RSS list.

This year I was blown away to find that the Technium, my book-in-progress blog, was ranked #11.

Fimoculous also produces the world's best meta list every year. Its annual List of Lists lists all the "best of lists" on the web. Categorized by kind. So you can get all the Best Movies lists published in English this year. Or Best Books lists, etc. The genius of this meta-list is the scope. There's more than 650 lists, and they include stuff like the list of Best Comics, Best Games, Best Videos, Best Predictions, etc. Fimoculous has done this for 6 years; it's a staggering amount of work. I am waiting for someone to parse these lists and come up with the Best of the Best Lists, which combines and correlates the winners in each category into one pan-annual list.

Originally posted by (author unknown) from KK Lifestream, on January 3, 2009 1:10 AM

Tom linked to this 2002 conversation between Kent Beck (programmer) and Alan Cooper (interaction designer), "Extreme Programming vs. Interaction Design":

Kent Beck is known as the father of "extreme programming," a process created to help developers design and build software that effectively meets user expectations. Alan Cooper is the prime proponent of interaction design, a process with similar goals but different methodology. We brought these two visionaries together to compare philosophies, looking for points of consensus - and points of irreconcilable difference.

So they reach one point of irreconcilable difference about midway through:

Beck: OK, wait. I agreed with you very close to 100 percent, then you just stepped off the rails. I don't see why this new specialist has to do his or her job before construction begins?

Cooper: It has to happen first because programming is so hellishly expensive and the cost of programming is like the cost of pulling teeth. ... Building software isn't like slapping a shack together; it's more like building a 50-story office building or a giant dam.

Beck: I think it's nothing like those. If you build a skyscraper 50 stories high, you can't decide at that point, oh, we need another 50 stories and go jack it all up and put in a bigger foundation.

Cooper: That's precisely my point.

Beck: But in the software world, that's daily business.

Cooper: That's pissing money away and leaving scar tissue.

The interview might as well stop there, because this is the One, Central, Insurmountable difference between these two approaches toward development work. XP is adapted to a context where motivation is expensive and change is cheap. Interaction design (at least how Cooper explains it) is adapted to a context where motivation is cheap and change is expensive. It should be obvious that contexts of both kinds can exist in the world: there are situations where it's easy to return to previous decisions and modify them (software, for one), and there are other situations where it's not (e.g. buildings, dams).

I think in this particular case, Cooper is pretty much wrong. They're talking about software, so we know that change is relatively cheap in the context of this conversation - cheaper than buildings, anyway. They just start to touch on the way in which running code becomes an object to think with, a thing to learn from: "you can build a program that improves with age instead of having it born powerful and gradually degrading" (Beck). Cooper believes that it's possible to suss out requirements and desires by talking to people about what they want and getting sign-off on a promise, but experience shows that people's desires change in response to novelty. Henry Ford's "faster horse" line comes to mind, as does perpetual beta wunderkind Flickr: starting with something that works enough to elicit use and reaction trumps big, up-front design when your changes are low cost. There are contexts where change is high-cost: skyscrapers, movies, mass-produced objects. Software, especially the astounding percentage of the world's software that's written by companies for their own internal use, is not one of them.

Comments

Originally posted by (author unknown) from tecznotes, on January 2, 2009 11:30 PM

Ok first off... I have a very important question.

IS THERE ANYONE OUT THERE WHO STILL HASN'T GOTTEN SOMETHING FROM ME IN A TRADE WE COMPLETED

I still haven't sent Jack Plumstead's cards, but I found something for him just yesterday so that's ok. Don Wood's cards are in the mail. Thorzul's Timelines are in the mail. I still haven't sent out White Sox Cards' contest winnings from a couple of months ago, but I'm glad because the last packge I sent was killed by the post office. I also need to send out the winnings from the Tony Gwynn contest.

If anyone else out there is sitting by your mailbox in the freezing cold waiting for their cards from me in the trade you sent off two months ago, call me out on it. Sorry, I fucked up. Your cards are probably in the box of still unsent Xmas giveaway piles. E-mail me a reminder, preferably with well placed profanity and tell me to send that stuff on Monday.

This past month has been pretty difficult, and I've gotten completely unorganized instead of the mostly unorganized I usually am. This was the first day in over a month I had absolutely no responsibilities, so I took a sleep aid. I woke up at 7:45. Not AM. It's been that kind of month. Anyway, it's a new year, things are finally less hectic and it's time to get my act together.

I've had a few different ways of handling trades before, and none of them worked. I tried flagging the e-mail offers, I still lost the e-mails. I tried writing everything down in a notebook, I misplaced the notebook. I tried remembering them all in my steel trap mind... well, let's just move on. Here's how I'll be handling trades from now on.

I've set up a trade page HERE. It is also linked down by my wantlists. The instructions are on the page. To summarize, if you want to trade, leave a comment on that post and e-mail me. I'll look it over and e-mail you back. If I've accepted the trade I'll post it up on that page along with the status of the trade. If there isn't a post on that page, then there is no trade. Simple enough? I hope so.

Also, I'm going to update the wantlist page this weekend. If you want yours on there, let me know.

The second half to this trade organization is to get all my doubles together. I have all my retro doubles from Heritage, A&G and Goudey more or less together. The next part I'm going to work on is the '80s Topps doubles. I have enough of 'em to build a house of cards the size of the Taj Mahal, so it's time to get them together enough to distribute them to people who could use them. Just about every wantlist I see includes at least one set from the '80s so that's a good place to start. Once I've gotten them together I'll post what sets I have for trade on my Trade Bait page. The Completed Trade and Trade Bait pages aren't actually together yet, but they'll eventually be linked over with the want lists.

Hopefully I'll be better about all this in 2009. I'll give it my best shot anyway!

Originally posted by dayf from Cardboard Junkie, on January 2, 2009 4:32 PM

As an appetizer before my annual best links of the year post (coming Monday, I hope), I put together a list of kottke.org posts from 2008 that I liked the most and that may be worth a look if you missed them the first time around.

In January, I liveblogged the Mythbusters episode about the airplane on the conveyor belt. I still get email telling me that the plane won't take off.

Time merge media is a collection of video and photographic works which display multiple time periods at once.

A collection of single serving sites, single-page sites like Barack Obama Is My New Bicycle, Khaaan!, and Is Lost A Repeat?

A liveblog of the Oscars written without actually watching them.

A post about the end of The Wire.

In March, kottke.org turned 10 years old and I collected a bunch of the previous designs together.

One of my all-time favorite threads on kottke.org: saying words wrong on purpose.

My favorite graph which doubles as a picture of my son.

Stanley Kubrick, Pablo Ferro, and Arthur Lipsett.

A photo of Ollie attempting to walk in Turbine Hall in the Tate Modern.

A collection of early movie reviews, including one by Maxim Gorky from 1896.

Survival tips for the Middle Ages, another great thread about how a contemporary person might fend for themselves in 1000 AD.

Hypnerotomachia Poliphili is a book printed in 1499 but which looks quite contemporary.

The most beautiful suicide, a photo of Evelyn Hale taken by Robert Wiles a few minutes after she jumped from the Empire State Building

A pair of posts about the Metropolitan Life Tower: the tower's past and future and an unusual death that occurred in the building shortly after it opened.

A collection of election maps from the 2008 US Presidential election.

Timeline twins.

And finally, the opening space scene in 2001: A Space Odyssey with chickens from The Muppet Show clucking the Blue Danube waltz.

Originally posted by jason@kottke.org from kottke.org, on January 2, 2009 4:27 PM

like physical evictions, there need to be laws protecting community data in the event of closure  

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Waxy.org Links, on January 2, 2009 3:23 PM

Sunday Jan 4, 2009
Memorial Rides:
Bronx - 10:45am
Queens - 12:00pm
Brooklyn - 12:45pm

Memorial Walk:
Manhattan - 2:30pm

Convergence:
4pm- Manhattan, Delancey at Allen Street

Gathering of cyclists, pedestrians, families and friends:
5-7pm
St. Marks Church
131 East 10th Street at 2nd Ave.

read on for detailed ride/walk schedule and check ghostbikes.org for updates

note: the 5 Borough Bike Club has organized early morning feeder rides to get to these start points.

Bronx/Upper Manhattan Ride:
10:45-11:10 gather at White Plains rd and Allerton ave
-subway: 2 to Allerton
11:15 Michael Needham -Barnes ave north of Allerton ave
12:30 Faustino Morales -Truxton st and Randall ave
1:20 meetup & break nw corner of Central Park at Frederick Douglass circle
1:35 Unnamed -Central Park West at w110th st
2:30 Alvaro Olsen -w36th st and Broadway
3:15 Amelia Geocos -e49th st and 1st ave

Queens/North Brooklyn Ride:
12:00 - 12:15 Gather in Astoria Park at east end of running track (Hoyt &19th st)
--subway: N to Astoria blvd
12:30 Arturo Flores -27th st and 23rd ave
1:30 Asif Rahman -Queens blvd at 55th road
2:30 Sze Man (Josephine) Chan -Manhattan and Montrose aves
3:15 Unnamed -under north side of Williamsburg bridge, Brooklyn

Brooklyn/Lower Manhattan Ride:
12:45-1:00 gather top of Sunset Park hill (6th ave btwn 41-44th sts)
-subway: R to 45th st.
1:15 Pedro Fernandez-Pacheco -54th st and 7th ave
2:15 Jonathan Millstein -President st. and 8th ave
2:45 Alexander Toulouse -Livingston and Boreum sts
3:30 Jian-Lan Zhang -Hester and Allen sts

Pedestrian Memorial Walk:
2:30-2:45 gather at Bowery and Canal st. (northeast corner)
-subway: 6, J, M, Z, R, Q to Canal
2:50 Lai Ho -Bowery and Canal st
3:10 James Dong -in front of 106 Bowery btwn Hester and Grand sts
3:40 Josephine LaPlaca -Delancey at Allen st

Convergence of Walk & Rides:
4:00 Rides/Walk convergence -Delancey at Allen st.
4:30 Rasha Shamoon -Delancey st. and the Bowery

Gathering of cyclists, pedestrians, families and friends -subway: 6 to Astor Place
5:00 Memorial for Unknown Cyclists and Pedestrians -e10th st @ 2nd ave
5:15-7:00 Gathering at St. Marks Church, 131 e10th st. @ 2nd ave

Contact: info[at]ghostbikes.org or press[at]ghostbikes.org

Originally posted by Molly Fair from Just Seeds: Blog, on January 2, 2009 2:28 PM

Rogue Amoeba: “Pulsar is a desktop client for listening to XM Radio Online and SIRIUS Internet Radio, the internet streaming services provided by XM and SIRIUS satellite radio.”

Looks pretty cool.

Originally posted by Brent Simmons from ranchero.com, on January 2, 2009 2:02 PM

Last night we watched The Dark Knight on Apple TV (it’s just as good the second time around), and noticed something new -- the aspect ratio occasionally switched from 2.4:1 (classic widescreen with the black bars) to 1.78:1 (which filled the entire display). Turns out that the 1.78:1 shots (mostly action sequences) were filmed with IMAX cameras, and for the home video release (at least on Blu-Ray and AppleTV) they kept the aspect ratio intact for those scenes. I guess we should have seen the movie in IMAX to begin with.

There’s a long and involved thread at AV Science Forum about the aspect ratio switch on the BluRay release, complete with a poll (“Should studios release movies with inconsistent aspect ratio switching?”). (My take? Yes. It totally worked.) And I’m sure this won’t be the last time we see this in action — Slashfilm had an item recently about Dark Knight director Christopher Nolan saying that he would love to shoot an entire feature with IMAX cameras.

Originally posted by Michael Sippey from this is sippey.typepad.com, on January 2, 2009 12:08 PM

According to Mental Floss, the genesis story behind the bushy eyebrowed muppet with his endearing Swedish-gibberish accent ("Yom-yom-yommm, mit de chocolad!") and wooden spatulas:

Swedish Chef Lars “Kuprik” Bäckman claims he was the inspiration for the Swedish Chef. He was on Good Morning America, he says, and caught Jim Henson’s eye. Henson supposedly bought the rights to the Good Morning America recording and created the Swedish Chef (who DOES have a real name, but it’s not understandable). One of the Muppet writers, Jerry Juhl, says that in all of the years of working with Jim Henson on the Swedish Chef, he never heard that the character was based on a real person.

Every year during the Muppets Christmas reruns time, we are reminded of the Swedish Chef and all his glory. My favorite moment in Swedish Chef history is when he uses his "boom-boom" shooting tactic to make donuts from muffins: "See de moofin? Und here mit de boome shooten!"

Originally posted by Erin Zimmer from Serious Eats, on January 2, 2009 12:00 PM

From Slice

I recall a certain episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation in which the android Mr. Data is told that although his recital of Mozart's "Eine Kleine Nachtmusik" is technically perfect, it lacks soul.

That's how I feel about most of the Neapolitan-style pizza I've tried. When it's done right, it's delicious but often lacks a nice crispness, and its daintiness is almost always just a little less than satisfying.

So when Girl Slice and I met up with some of her friends at Pizzeria Delfina in San Francisco's Mission District over the holidays, I was prepared to be mehhed.

The photos I'd seen of Pizzeria Delfina's pies all said Neapolitan, and San Francisco Chronicle food critic Michael Bauer described it as "thin crust, Neapolitan style with a nod to New York."

"Nod to New York," I thought. We'll see. It seems that when I travel outside New York, the pizza I eat falls into three categories:

• Decent-to-masterful Neapolitan-style pizza
• "Not New York–style but good for XYZ city"
• Ugh

Where did Delfina fall?

Thankfully in none of the categories above. It was, similar to Bauer's description, equal parts Neapolitan (small, personal-size pizzas with exceptionally puffy rims) and New York-style (that all-important and hard-to-achieve crisp-chewy crust).

Somehow, Delfina is able to crank out some satisfyingly proper-crusted pizzas in a gas-fired oven. That the toppings are fresh and outstanding doesn't hurt either. We shared four different pizzas to eat through a variety of what's on offer at this small space next door to the heralded original Delfina restaurant.

The Salsiccia came recommended by Bauer in his review; it's topped with house-made fennel sausage, tomato, bell peppers, onions, and mozzarella ($14). I'm pretty much a sucker for any sausage-and-onion pie. This one was my favorite of the evening.

Girl Slice chose for her pick a basic Margherita (pictured at top of post), which was good, because it gave us a good baseline to judge crust, cheese, sauce, and overall balance. It passed—and exceeded—muster in all respects. New Yorkers familiar with Lucali should imagine one of Mark Iacono's pizzas but smaller.

We also chose a couple pizzas that were either specials or that weren't listed on the Pizzeria Delfina online menu, because I have no idea which of the seven on-menu pizzas the two above would be. Sorry. The point of the dinner was not so much a pizza review as it was a catching-up with (and, for me, meeting new) friends.

The topmost of the two pies above was a white pizza topped with guanciale, and the one just above had prosciutto and fresh greens and was almost a salad pizza. Not bad, but by the point I ended up eating these two, I was stuffed to the gills, and I'm afraid I couldn't full appreciate them.

You see, I had eaten a "baby burrito" at La Corneta between lunch and dinner.

Fresh-stretched mozzarella appetizer (four ounces; $8.25).

Insalata tricolore (arugula, radicchio, and endive with lemon, extra virgin olive oil, and grana padano; $8)

The fact that we noshed on some appetizers (above) didn't help things, either.

Another box joins the Slice Pizza Box Museum.

We couldn't house all the pizza on the table by the end of the meal and had to take some home.

The only other pizzerias I've eaten at in San Francisco are Pizzaiolo and Blondie's. Blondie's was UGH, but I'd have hard time choosing which was better among Delfina and Pizzaiolo. Though, from memory, I'd give the edge to Delfina right now. I'd have to revisit both on the same day to do a head-to-head comparison.

And, yeah, I know there are tons of other places that I should have tried, but I only had so many meals out on my dance card while I was there, so don't rake me over the coals for missing your favorite or one that you think is better than Delfina. (Although you're free to leave suggestions in the comments here for my next visit.)

Pizzeria Delfina

Address: 3611 18th Street, San Francisco CA 94110 (near Guererro; map)
Phone: 415-437-6800
Website: pizzeriadelfina.com

Bonus: Star Trek's Mr. Data Plays Music

Originally posted by Adam Kuban from Serious Eats, on January 2, 2009 11:30 AM

Filed under: Freeware, iPhone

Just when you thought you had the Google Mobile App with voice search all figured out, Google goes and reveals an Easter egg hidden in the settings menu.

To get there, just keep scrolling down below the 'about' button. If you keep at it, the previously hidden 'Bells and Whistles' button will appear, giving you these additional options:

• Different theme colors to change the look of the app
• Changes to the sounds the app uses, including monkeys and chickens
• The addition of a live waveform when you are speaking -- kind of like an oscilloscope
  
• The option to open links in the app itself rather than transferring to Safari

Google is hinting there may be even more hidden functions, but they are going to wait until Macworld to identify them. The Google Mobile App is free for the iPhone and iPod touch.

TUAWGoogle iPhone app is the gift that keeps on giving originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Fri, 02 Jan 2009 15:45:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

Originally posted by Mel Martin from The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW), on January 2, 2009 10:45 AM

This is awesome.

(It’s the Yama Vacuum Brewer - 5 cup.)

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Marco.org, on January 2, 2009 10:38 AM

With a gigantic mob of revelers preparing to descend upon Washington for Barack Obama’s inauguration on January 20, tickets to the handful of official inaugural balls will be extraordinarily hard to come by. There are usually about 10 or 12 official balls, and they’re organized around groups of states. Barring some sort of magic back-channel connection I haven’t discovered yet, I won’t be suiting up for an Obama ball this year. But I may head down to D.C. anyway, just for the fun.

I was lucky enough to attend presidential inaugural balls in both 1993 and 1997:

In late 1992 I began dating a woman who was working for the Clinton/Gore campaign here in New York. At the beginning of January, the Clinton whirlwind plucked her from Manhattan and deposited her in Washington at a job with the Department of Health and Human Services. A couple of weeks later, I traveled down to D.C. to attend Clinton’s inauguration and one of the presidential inaugural balls, which my girlfriend had scored us tickets to. I think it was the first time I’d ever worn a tux. It was an incredibly exciting 24 hours, heightened by everyone’s glee over the official end of 12 years of Reagan and Bush.

At the beginning of 1997, I was a few months into a yearlong stint at an editing job in D.C. A friend of mine easily scored us tickets to Clinton’s second round of inaugural balls. It wasn’t anywhere near as exciting as 1993, but it was still a swank and memorable night.

Originally posted by Andrew Hearst from Panopticist, on January 2, 2009 10:02 AM

If you've embedded a TEDTalk in the past on your own site or blog, today you may have noticed a new message in the embed player window: "Click here to view this video on TED.com. (Webmaster: Click through to embed our new player in your site)"

The backstory is, VideoEgg, the longtime host of TEDTalks embeds, has gotten out of the embed hosting business. This was a great excuse for us to write our own embeddable video player, adding a few improvements such as easier sharing.

We've been testing the new player on the TED Blog for a few weeks, and thanks very much to those who wrote in with feedback. Now we're officially making the switch to our new embed player.

You'll also need to swap in new code on your own site. Clicking through the embed window will take you to the Talk page for the video, where you can find and copy the new embed code.

You'll find the embed code in the "Share this talk" area below the player window -- see detail at right. Copy the new embed code, paste it over the old code on your site, and you're in business.

And while you're looking at the old embed window, if you see a black screen instead of the speaker image, would you drop an email to contact@ted.com and let us know? Title it "embed code" and it'll be swiftly addressed. In fact, send all your questions, comments and observations on the new player to contact@ted.com.

Originally posted by (author unknown) from TED | TEDBlog, on January 2, 2009 10:00 AM

The response to this seems favorable so far, so I'll go ahead full steam with these stupid cartoons chronicling the 2008 baseball card sets.


(context)

Originally posted by dayf from Cardboard Junkie, on January 2, 2009 9:54 AM

43 Folders: “Because ‘feeling creative’ produces great work in approximately the same way that ‘feeling like a doctor’ makes you a gifted thoracic surgeon.”

Originally posted by Brent Simmons from ranchero.com, on January 2, 2009 9:31 AM

Here's how I'd like to rate things on sites where you rate things.

Pretend these blocks are books, or movies, or video games in a particular genre. Let's say they're movies. Here is how I've arranged (drag and dropped) three of those movies. The better movie is on the right.

A few other people rate some movies in that genre.

Because I share a common pattern (3 items) with Ted, and a few with Alice and Bob, the following are recommended:

What I like about this type of rating is that it forces you to make decisions about what is better than another item. There are no five star movies or percentage ratings that can tie. This is better than that. If you see something new and fit it into the continuum it says something about that movie.

When people ask you if Iron Man is good, you don't say "yes, I gave it four stars" you say, "it's better than Spiderman II but not as good as the Dark Knight." That's meaningful.

Originally posted by torrez from Andre's Notes, on January 2, 2009 9:20 AM

Republicans now accusing Obama of palling around with Democrats.

Originally posted by Josh Marshall from Talking Points Memo, on January 2, 2009 7:32 AM

A newcomer to Rakudo and Perl 6 asked me "Where can I get a list of features that currently work in Rakudo?" Rather than try to build (and maintain) the list myself, I've built a wiki page for it at http://www.perlfoundation.org/perl6/index.cgi?rakudo_feature_status.

You'll notice that the page starts with a list of "common things that don't work" -- I'm hoping that people can use this to get a sense for the common pitfalls without having to search RT (which can be a bit slow). But below that we can start listing things that _do_ work.

Feel free to add/modify the page in whatever ways you think will be useful.

Pm

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Planet Perl Six, on January 2, 2009 6:50 AM

I can't believe I'm writing this, but for the foreseeable future this is my last post at TPM.

I'm heading over to The Washington Post, where I'll be writing the lead blog on a new site that WaPo is launching. This will drive you mad with curiosity, unfortunately, but the details on the new site and blog will only be forthcoming when it launches the week after next.

Needless to say, I'm hoping that every last one of you will come check out the new place when it's up and running. If you all want info on the new site, or just want to stay in touch, shoot me an email at sargegreg at gmail.com.

As you already know, what Josh has created here at TPM is an enormous achievement. It's hard for me to express just how much I've enjoyed and learned from my experience here. It's the best gig I've ever had -- even better than playing first base on the neighborhood little league team -- and it was an honor and a privilege to have had the chance to do whatever I've been able to help implement Josh's truly unique journalistic vision.

Josh is also a good and decent boss and enormously fun to work with. Many, many thanks, Josh, and here's hoping we'll work together again one day.

I also want to thank a few more people.

First among them: The indefatigable David Kurtz, who provided me with invaluable editing, direction and advice at no shortage of critical moments. He's funny as hell, too, which made things a lot easier at some very tricky and tense moments during the campaign.

Many thanks to Eric Kleefeld for all the terrific work he did for the site. I'll miss Eric's seemingly bottomless knowledge of political trivia and his entertaining (if relentless) tendency to play the young office Rodney Dangerfield. (You do get some respect, Eric, believe it or not.)

And thanks to Ben Craw for cutting all that great video that appeared here, to Andrew Golis for his tireless and innovative efforts to promote the site and boost its readership, and to Justin Elliott for regularly front-paging our stories with wit and alacrity. And of course, to my wife for supporting these efforts for an entire campaign.

And finally, you, readers. I'm humbled that so many of you spent so much time here for so long. For months and months and months, you kept the conversation lively, fun and smart. You made sure to let us know -- often rather vocally -- when we were wrong or being knuckle-headed. You also were responsible for helping us break some of the site's biggest stories. Simply put, this site would not have worked to whatever degree it did without you.

Okay, so that's it. Talk to you all soon.

Originally posted by Greg Sargent from TPM Election Central, on January 2, 2009 6:12 AM

Domaine 547 is a good place to buy wine. Once you buy wine Jill (the proprietress) gets a feeling for what you like and makes recommendation (and sometimes inventory decisions!) as a result. Better, she's got a thoughtful (low volume!) blog. And she's got good taste! Jill's six resolutions for the store could apply to any improving business (or blogger!). The list is below, but it's worth reading her post in it's entirety. Blog more, Read more, Expand inventory, Focus on value, Get to know other bloggers better, Take more pictures!

Originally posted by David Jacobs from hello, typepad, on January 2, 2009 6:04 AM

The latest round of the Shea Stadium auction ends January 5th.

Lots of stuff still available, from the obscure (Diamond Club check presenter. Price: $105. # of bidders: 4) to the sacred (Casey Stengel's retired number from left field. Price: $2,500. # of bidders: 1).

I have no problem with the Mets selling off stuff to charity and letting fans get a piece of their favorite stadium along the way. But all season long we wondered: what is coming to Citi Field? Beyond the Home Run Apple replica?

Jason over at Faith & Fear in Flushing wrote up a great post musing on this same subject. One choice excerpt:

"From the Shea sale to the Citi Field renderings to the Mets' statements, sometimes I get the uneasy feeling that the Mets see nothing wrong with rewriting or even restarting their history, casting aside the jumble of lovable futility, unlovable futility, championships won by an underdog and an overdog, ignoble chokes and noble failures for a simpler narrative: Once there were Brooklyn Dodgers, we won two titles, isn't Citi Field great?"

 Definitely take a trip to F&FinF and read the whole post.

Originally posted by Kingman from Loge 13, on January 2, 2009 4:45 AM

If you have some spare time in the next couple of weeks, the Parrot TODO/skip test review is an embarrassingly parallel milestone which is suitable for anyone who can read code written in Perl 5 and skim code written in PIR.

All you need to do is pick a test file not listed on that page which contains either TODO or SKIP (capitalization does not matter) and list it on the page, with a count of the affected tests and a marker whether there's an RT or TT referenced in the reason.

That's it.

You can mail the Parrot developer list directly or tell someone in #parrot on irc.perl.org.

Reviewing one test file is a help. Reviewing more is wonderful. If you have five minutes, you can do it!

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Planet Perl Six, on January 1, 2009 9:39 PM

Who owns the paintings made by a WWII concentration camp prisoner, if those paintings were arguably made as payment for her freedom? The artist? Or the state? Is the art public domain?

This is the decades-old question being asked by artist Dina Gottliebova Babbitt, wife of famed Disney animator Art Babbitt. She saved her own life and her mother’s life essentially by painting portraits of Gypsy prisoners at the behest of Josef Mengele, during their incarceration in Auschwitz. Years later, she moved to Paris and then to California, where she earned a living working for Warner Bros and Jay Ward.

Today, aged 86 and recently suffering from cancer, she is desperate to get these old paintings back.

Below is her impassioned plea on YouTube to the curators of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, who, while they acknowledge that she is the artist who created the paintings, still refuse to relinquish them to her, claiming they are the property of the state.

This story was also covered over at Animation Artist two years ago, and more recently on CBC’s The Current (where I just learned about it this evening). Here are parts one and two of that interview, about 50 minutes long in total, and quite powerful. Below this, some reproductions of these paintings.

Originally posted by Luc from Drawn! The Illustration and Cartooning Blog, on January 1, 2009 8:23 PM

After an embarrassingly long period of time, I updated Capn Design to MT 4.23 tonight. It was tempting to jump straight to the latest Motion beta, but I decided one major change was enough for now. Of course, I did get Action Streams set up so I can start collecting data. This is step one and two in my plan for world domination.

Writing this notice reminds me that I never told you, dear readers, that I've been an employee of Six Apart since last April. I was with Apperceptive from November 2006 until 6A acquired us a year and a half later and we became Six Apart Services. I could wax poetic about how awesome it's been and how the 2002 version of me would be incredibly giddy, but this is a news post; I wouldn't want to sully it with any kind of emotion.

So what am I going to be up to this year? Last year was predefined by my wedding, but this year's completely open and I'm excited by that. I'm looking forward to tackling lots of small projects, with this site being one of them.

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Capn Design, on January 1, 2009 7:58 PM

We do not find peace; we make it.

Originally posted by jjg from Jesse James Garrett's Hidden Agenda, on January 1, 2009 7:48 PM

I don't do end of year awards on this blog. Before I could definitively state what was the Best Set of 2008 (Upper Deck) or the Worst Card of 2008 (Topps Johan Santana No-Hitter) I'd feel compelled to thoroughly examine all the sets and all the cards and judge them objectively on their merits and I don't have time for that. I think the year deserves a eulogy though. Mainly because I'm so damn glad it's over. 2008 was one of the stupidest years on record for trading cards and I think it should be reviewed in a similarly stupid fashion. THOUGH AN INTERNET MEME.

There's this silly comic infesting message boards right now that amuses me to no end. The basic set up is three panels of an annoying everyday occurrence, followed by a fourth panel of frustration. The comic is done in MSPaint and usually has that same last panel. This being the internet, the joke is usually sophomoric, scatological or obscene in nature. If you want to learn more, here's the Reddit thread where I became acquainted with this phenomenon. It will take you to a message board post full of them (not safe for work) and has links to others (again, watch where you click) if you want to check some of them out. Or, if you're lazy and don't want to bother with that, just click here. I'm going to do several of these as the muse strikes me throughout the month. To win over my skeptical readers I will start off with some red meat for the blogging community:

BECKETTGATE

(click to enlarge)

See what I mean? There's more where this came from...

Originally posted by dayf from Cardboard Junkie, on January 1, 2009 7:45 PM

My favorite quote of 2009, so far, from this review of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (via David):

With his head digitally placed on various bodies, Pitt displays less character than did Marlon Wayans' CGI tour-de-force in Little Man--which hilariously said more about man's stages of life.

Look: I've seen Little Man, and calling anything about it a tour-de-force is absolutely ridiculous, because that's one of the stupidest, creepiest movies I've ever seen.

AND YET, I totally agree with this quote.

Originally posted by btrott from Stupidfool.org, on January 1, 2009 6:55 PM

Just after reading The Invention of Air, I’m listening to the audiobook of Malcolm Gladwell’s latest, Outliers. One thing that’s immediately apparent is that the two share a common theme — frustration with the “Great Man” approach to history and biography, where we credit someone’s success to that individual’s talent, perseverance, innate abilities. Instead, both take an intriguing systems approach to biography, suggesting that individuals are as much players in a larger context beyond their control, and success comes from largely from chance — people being fortunate to be in the right position at the right time. It intrigues me that these two writers have made this the central theme of their latest works at this time, and I wonder, well, what larger systems forces are in play that reveals this shared approach to biography.

Originally posted by peterme from peterme.com, on January 1, 2009 6:12 PM

Noam Scheiber asks whether, in an effort to attract substantial Republican support, Obama is aiming for too low a dollar amount ($675-$775 billion over 24 months) in his upcoming fiscal stimulus package.

I'm torn on this. As Noam points out, that looks to be a starting point at the low end of what most economists think is necessary, leaving treacherously little safe room to negotiate down. And everything about our recent history and current predicament tells me we have to be bold and aggressive, on policy and politics. But I've always had a weakness for One Nation politics; so I'm not willing to discount the possibility that Obama reshuffle the deck politically, operate under a different calculus.

Originally posted by Josh Marshall from Talking Points Memo, on January 1, 2009 5:55 PM

The comparison is obvious, but I'm pleased that Armond White and I both came to the same conclusion ("Hollywood cliché") that The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is nothing more than a "reworking [of] both Titanic and Forrest Gump." More from White: "Apparently, Fincher is speaking in fanboy code while Roth’s insipid love story pacifies the rabble. Hard to imagine who’ll have the least fun." Our house recommends The Wrestler, we've already watched it twice.

Originally posted by David Jacobs from hello, typepad, on January 1, 2009 4:24 PM

Happy New Year! I hope everyone’s year started off well! (:

I apologize for the lack of updates, downtime, and mess. I’ve made a few changes to the blog:

• The web hosting has been changed to (mt) Media Temple;
• WordPress has been updated to version 2.7;
• And the theme has been changed to Busy Bee by WooThemes.

I also have an announcement. ‘Top Blogs About WordPress’ will be back this month. So, feel free to suggest new blogs to the list. (:

Oh, and the blog is now using IntenseDebate for the comments.

Originally posted by Artur Kim from WP Themes Gallery, on January 1, 2009 3:58 PM

If you have the MLB Channel on your cable or satellite provider, do yourself a favor and watch the Don Larson perfect game they are showing. I think they are replaying it several times tonight. If you can't watch it, TiVo it or tape it or have your kid draw pictures of the game that you can look over later. This is Baseball Nirvana. Mel Allen & Vin Scully calling the game. About 147 Hall of Famers between the two rosters. Bob Costas interviewing Yogi and Don. The cheezy Gilette commercials are icing on the cake. If they keep showing stuff like this I'm not going to get a whole lot done this year.

HOLY CRAP! Cardboard Icons has one of 'em!!!

Originally posted by dayf from Cardboard Junkie, on January 1, 2009 3:43 PM

Perl::Critic 1.094 is on its way to a CPAN mirror near you. There are a number of changes in it, but there's one in particular that I want to point out. A new policy called Miscellanea::ProhibitUselessNoCritic.

Read more of this story at use Perl.

Originally posted by elliot (posted by brian_d_foy) from use Perl, on January 1, 2009 2:26 PM

"Tumblr doesn't solve that problem. Reblogging is boring. We don't need more curators, we need more creators, and we need ways to aggregate what we do in the real world and connect it with people we care about. There needs to be a hub, flexible enough for new sites and content types to be added and removed as the tides ebb and flow. For the time being, that'll be a personal site for me. We'll see what happens."

Originally posted by Michal Migurski from tecznotes links, on January 1, 2009 11:41 AM

Here’s a brief-ish list of things I’d like to accomplish in the coming year: 1. The most obvious (and important) resolution is to actually write blog posts. I’ve been a bit remiss about that lately, because of time constraints combined with a bit of writer’s block. While neither of these have gotten any better, I think [...]

Originally posted by d547 from domaine547, on January 1, 2009 11:03 AM

Sign spotted roadside in Kona. Photographed with chuckles and various jokes.

Originally posted by DL Byron from Bike Hugger, on January 1, 2009 10:04 AM

In the waning days of 2008, a bunch of Loge13 readers got a late holiday present: their Shea seats.

After being delayed for weeks, giant crates began arriving on the doorsteps of those fans willing to drop $869 on two authentic Met behind-holders.

At least one reader was not pleased with his package. Gerard wrote in a comment:

I got my seats today and there is on one way to describe them...RIP OFF!!!!!

The seats are dirty, have to somehow be modified so that you can actually sit in them and have nothing on them to indicate that they are authentic.

The Wilpon's must need the money from these seats to offset their investment losses to Bernie Madoff.

So far, Gerard seems to be in the minority. Ron Hunt called me as soon as his Loge level honeys arrived and sent along these photos and his thoughts:

My Loge Shea Stadium seats arrived today and I must admit that while I was very excited when the email came with the delivery date but after seeing them and SITTING in them, I'm beside myself.

Having to drag these 95 lbs beasts from my driveway, into my basement and then up the stairs to my living room, I felt in the season, like I had the power of ten Grinch's  plus 2.

My "new Loge" seats, numbers 3 & 4, are kinda worn, they look like they lived on the third base line loge box or left field loge box seats.  They are faded from the sun - which went down that foul line -  unlike my pristine Loge13 seats covered by the press and suite level from the climates. But faded Shea seats seems appropriate...and they are in my living room.

The armrests have been stripped and repainted. On either side are remnants of the hardware from the seat bottoms of the seats next to you. They did a nice job of adding these black  L - brackets to accommodate for the fact that the seats were previously attached to the cement risers and not the floor.  I'm thinking mahogany or teak for under my seats, your thoughts are welcome. And, yes - they may never make it to my backyard, they are too cool in my living room. My own bleachers!

The best thing was sitting in them, it was an immediate feeling of, I've been here, and very comforting. We've all been in many stadia, but these are Shea seats, no doubt. It was great to sit back, put my arm over the empty seat and relax, close my eyes and think of Shea, imagining the old section and park.

Just in my mind and with a lot more legroom.

Congratulations Ron!

Originally posted by Kingman from Loge 13, on January 1, 2009 5:17 AM

I read this funny article about how the 'Sensitive Female Chord Progression' has infiltrated so many songs.

Link: Striking a chord - Boston Globe

Even though Beyoncé's "If I Were a Boy" hit radio too late to be the song of the summer, there's still a case to be made that it's the perfect song to cap off the year. It's not because of the empathetic lyrics, or B's heartrending, disappointed vocals. No, it has everything to do with the four chords that underpin the song's verse, circling from yearning to triumph and back again, four chords that were inescapable in 2008.

While some of the comments were snooty, there was a great link to the video below - a comedian talking about how Pachabel's Canon in D has hounded him his whole life.

Originally posted by charlie from Lifeblog, on January 1, 2009 3:34 AM

As of December 30, 2008, I am a legal resident of Dubai, UAE.

When Della Van Heyst invited me to a conference in Bahrain in 2007, I decided to go because I had never really been to the Middle East and realized that I needed to understand the region better if I one of my goals was to be a global citizen. The meeting was interesting and only reinforced my view that I was completely ignorant about the Middle East and Muslim culture. After Bahrain, Jay took me to Dubai where he was about to relocate to and introduced me to some people including his friend Balall.

My work at Creative Commons includes supporting the spread of Creative Commons globally. We have had success in Asia, Latin America, North America, Australia/New Zealand and Europe. While we have met some great people and are moving forward in the Middle East and Africa, these two regions continued to be difficult for us. Last year, we appointed Donatella Della Ratta as the Creative Commons person in the Middle East and Donatella along with my small (but increasing) number of Muslim friends have tried to coach me and navigate my understanding of the region.

However, I soon decided that trying to learn about the Muslim world remotely wasn't going to work. At the risk of making vast racial stereotypes, I felt that I understood most of the major cultures in the world, but the Muslim culture was one that I simply couldn't "grok" well.

As with most of my important decisions in life, I decided to jump in feet first based on my intuition and spend much more time in the region by moving my home base to Dubai. After considering various ideas, I decided that Dubai was a fairly safe, liberal and convenient location from where I could operate. While it is wildly different in many ways than anywhere else I've been, basic infrastructure such as medical facilities, airline travel and banking seemed to work and there appeared to be a critical mass of friends who could help me assimilate. Also, as part of my mission to fill in my gaping blind spots, Dubai seemed to make Africa a bit closer as well.

As someone who doesn't spend "the majority" of my time in any place except in airplanes, "moving to Dubai" basically means setting up a residence and shipping most of my "stuff" here. My main business is investing in early stage consumer Internet companies all over the world and my main non-profit work is Creative Commons, which are both global. I intend to spend my "spare" time here (except maybe in the hot summers) working on my academic work and learning Arabic. Keio University is trying to develop relationships here and in the region and I'll do my best to support these efforts as well.

While there are some very interesting people in Dubai and I'm slowly meeting many of them, I think that a great deal of my work in the region will be in other Arab countries and Africa. Dubai will be sort of my hub and I will explore from here.

Mizuka's mother and our extended family in Chiba will hold down the fort in Japan and Mizuka will probably spit her time between Japan and Dubai. I will continue to spend a fairly large chunk of my time in Japan, US and Europe.

Finally, I want to thank Jay, Renu, Ballal and Nazia all of their help in my ongoing transition to Dubai. I also want to thank Ambassador Hatano and Maria for providing me with a lot of context and support in connecting with the academic community here.

There are still many things in the air and I haven't really "turned off" any commitments that I have elsewhere so I don't expect my behavior our profile to change too drastically to the casual observer, but I can already feel some interesting changes as I start calling Dubai my home.

Note: I realize that I use Muslim an Middle East interchangeably and that there are many other faiths in the region. However, I spent my life growing up most non-Muslim faiths so the Muslim part makes up the biggest chunk of my ignorance.

Originally posted by Joi from Joi Ito's Web, on January 1, 2009 3:05 AM

Shiba Inu Puppy Cam, AKC MEET THE BREEDS®: Shiba Inu, I Can Has Cheezeburger, Hahaha, Laughing Baby, Kawaii, Twitter Search for ‘puppy+cam’, Adorable beyond EVERYTHING, Puppycam popularity (Today Show, CNN, and NBC), Puppy Cam Basically The Happiest Thing In The World, Puppy Cam!, But What Does the Puppycam Mean?, Charlie bit my finger - again !, SFShiba, Shiba Inu live puppy cam tribute

Originally posted by hello@rocketboom.com (Rocketboom) from Rocketboom, on January 1, 2009 3:00 AM

All right, 2009! Gotta be better than 2008, right? Has to be! I love New Year's Day! It's like Spring Training for life! Everything is all happiness and hope and anticipation for a good year! Sure, by February our hopes and dreams will once again be dashed on the rocks of despair, but right now it's PAR-TAY TIME! WOOOOOOOOOOO 2009!!!!!

With 2009 comes changes and resolutions and new beginnings. My first new beginning for 2009 is the new banner. I feel bad about ditching Old Planter, but I think I did good on the new masthead. There's a lot happening up there so I've put together a key to what all this stuff is all about. Click on the image to make it bigger if you can't quite see it.


1: The Title

This is now, and will always be the official Cardboard Junkie font. What is it you ask? Goudy Stout, of course. Why the lime green J, you ask? Why Not?

2: 1993 Florida Department of Agriculture Mark Lemke

The greatest card of all time. Period. Can't get better than this. You can read all about this set in my Card of the Week post. I haven't set this in stone yet, but I think 2009 is the year I try to get one of every Mark Lemke card ever made.

3: The cartoon on the back of Dennis Sarfate's 2008 Topps... Heritage High Numbers

Madding suggested I put this into the banner and I did. I had planned to do it since I first pulled the card so don't go thinking you guys can make me do stuff.

4: The Anti-Drug ad on the back of a 1988 O-Pee-Chee wrapper

Along with the font, this odd little toon will be incorporated in the CJ masthead forevermore. I am still looking for that damn wrapper that had the immortal words "Do Cards, Not Drugs" on it. I know for a fact that I saw it with my own eyes back in the '90s but I can't find it for the life of me. If anyone out there can tell me what pack that motto is on, I'll give you an auto or a relic card. If you get the wrapper itself into my hands, you'll get an auto and a relic card. Some enterprising wrapper bounty hunter out there has got to be willing to take me up on that offer.

5: Earl Weaver animation

I borrowed this from one of my favorite videos ever. The language in this is absolutely filthy, so get the kiddies out of the room before you watch it a dozen times.



6: 2007 Allen & Ginter Torii Hunter mini

No explanation necessary.

7: Photo of the 1982 NL West Championship celebration

This is Skip Caray, The San Diego Chicken and what could very well be Ted Turner in a fantastic photo that I found in an old book commemorating the 20th anniversary of the Braves in Atlanta.

8: Gil Elvgren set Promo Card "Fire Bell"

What can I say? I like retro pin up girls and Elvgren was a master. If I ever see this set in a shop I'm buying it.

9: 2007 Goudey Ichiro Heads Up Cartoon short print

I just picked this card up from Oligato House. I love the Heads up set and Ichiro is one of my favorite players.

10: 1988 Flaming Carrot Comics set

Flaming Carrot is my favorite comic, and I picked up a trading card set of ol' Flamey a few years back. The Carrot has a pretty good arm, he's also a dang good whiffle ball player.

11: Modified 1965 Topps Warren Spahn

I got this card years ago at Atlanta Sports Cards (the original one) out of the bargain box. I think a guy I knew at school did the actual alterations. This card also highlights my mockery of all things Metropolitan.

1993 Upper Deck Chipper Jones Inside the Numbers

You knew I had to have a Chipper on there somewhere. I used a rare reverse negative Chipper too.

13: 1956 Topps Hank Aaron

Hey, it's my favorite card. It had to be there somewhere, right?

Originally posted by dayf from Cardboard Junkie, on January 1, 2009 2:09 AM

• Bon Iver - The Wolves (Act I and II)

Some years seem to pass by without much to commemorate them. I'd be hard pressed for example to recall anything specific about 2003 (that's sort of embarrassing actually, but literally true). This year flew by for me, and while it wasn't filled with any monumental realizations, it was abound with changes and things that happened - I thought I'd make a few notes in case I find myself looking back in 5 years...

Early this year I felt like I closed a chapter, tying up loose ends and wrapping up at Yahoo! and by extension (and with more finality), Upcoming. I left for my 9th SXSW in March a free man - and for the first time with both the inclination and the time to stick around for SXSW Music. I've booked my two weeks for next year.

I had a couple months to play (thanks Brady) before getting wrapped up in presidential politics. Enough has been written about how a bunch of geeks helped make a new type of campaign possible. For now I'll just say that I'm proud (and rather humbled) to have been able to spend a big chunk of 2008 helping to elect a better President. It was worth doing.

There were a lot of things that I didn't get to this year, and I've made a list of the things I want to make an effort to do better for next year, not least of which is emerging from semi-hermitude -- at some point over the past couple years, "hanging out" seems to have become a much harder thing to do; not a novel observation I know, but true nonetheless. Still, this year I think was a great boon in terms of tempering, in the best way, both my expectations and ambitions. Rather than being dulled, I feel rather my resolve and focus being made more durable. And while I'm stilling processing it all, I emerge not feeling old, but rather older, and maybe a bit wiser.

I've been up for the past 2 days working on a brand new project that I'm incredibly excited about, and I'm thinking that 2009 might see a return to regular blogging - sharing the news lessons I'm learning, and maybe telling some old war stories as well.

Happy New Year everyone.

Originally posted by (author unknown) from random($foo), on December 31, 2008 10:00 PM

I'm kicking off the New Year by laying down a set of propositions that could be a platonic ideal for those of us who strive to loose ourselves from the soul drubbing machine (aka here as The Black Box) of mass-produced and mass-marketed food , quack medical and diet cons and the suppuration of self-serving half-truths that drip from the minds of lifestyle experts and real and self-imagined celebrity chefs et al.

I'll anticipate the finger wagging of those who will accuse me of lording it over others by telling them how to live, by emphasizing that the following list is NOT a command, it's a proposal and the elucidation of a potential ideal. It's also highly irrational in the sense that it is impossible to practice. But I'm cool with that. Billions measure their lives and behavior against abstract ideals that they know they can never reach. I don't see why I need to be any different.

At the core of the list is the supra-proposition that suggests that the only way to begin to take control of your nutrition away from the control of people who don't give a rat's hair about your well-being, is to do it all yourself: take control of the whole process from gametes-to-table-to-gullet. If you screw it up, you've only yourself to blame and if you succeed you can own that too.

Here goes.

1. Do not buy food.
2. Raise or catch your food yourself or with family and friends.
   
3. If you can't raise or catch your food, then only buy food that is not processed.
4. Prepare your food with your own hands (and with the hands of family and friends).
   
5. Use cooking methods that extend the cooking process and reject short cuts.
6. Pay careful attention to aesthetics and strive for simplicity in the appearance and composition of each dish.
   
7. Eat slowly and linger long at the table.
8. Pay attention to what the scientific community says about nutrition but do not be credulous. Remain skeptical while giving serious consideration to empirical evidence only.
   
9. As a matter of principle and practice reject diets, dieting or any way of eating that is not consistent with what you already know is the right way to eat and that is not based on rigorously obtained empirical evidence.
   
10. As a matter of principle and practice reject all advice about how to eat from "experts"who do not qualify their recommendations by letting you know that they are not absolutely sure that their advice is true.
    
11. Never fully trust anyone who is unwilling to admit doubt about what they believe.
    
12. You are the only one who knows what is right for you and your loved ones: cook and eat to that. Not even Dr. Phil knows you better than you do. :-)
    

Have a Great 2009!

The best sauce in the world is hunger.

Originally posted by Bob del Grosso from A Hunger Artist, on December 31, 2008 7:00 PM

Well, we've wrapped up 2008 at Serious Eats (we accept that some of you think we have in fact over-wrapped it), so I wanted to take this opportunity to wish all of the serious eaters out there a happy, happy new year. Our collective New Year's resolution at SE HQ is to bring you as much fresh, hot, delicious food content in 2009 as we can possibly dish up. If that means being even more vigilant in our never-ending search for seriously delicious food, we are ready, willing, and able. I hope that we are more than up to that all-too-pleasurable task. What are your New Year's food resolutions?

Originally posted by Ed Levine from Serious Eats, on December 31, 2008 4:00 PM

Filed under:
Tags: happy new year, new year's eve 2009 new york

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Heading East, on December 31, 2008 3:28 PM

Last Run of 2008 from Alaina Browne on Vimeo.

For Christmas, Anil surprised me with a Flip Mino HD. It's a well-designed pocket-sized HD camcorder that's incredibly fun and easy to use. I took it with me on my run today and recorded a few scenes along the way. When I got home I used FlipShare, Flip's software for managing and editing video files to edit them together into a movie. It was dead simple and let me do exactly what I wanted to do easily and without having to refer to a manual or any help docs. I didn't cure at my computer a single time! So simple, in fact, that I then upgraded my Vimeo account to Vimeo Plus (another well-designed, fun to use product) because I know I'm going to be playing with this a lot. Thanks, Anil and thanks, Flip for making an awesome product!

Originally posted by Alaina from alaina browne lives here, on December 31, 2008 1:27 PM

I’ll keep this short and sweet.

I’m grateful to my family for supporting and encouraging me in my life pursuits. In particular, to my wife Chrissa and my infant son Henry. It’s cheesy but true, their love keeps me going every day.

I’m also grateful to everybody on the internet who gives me the time of day. You invigorate and revitalize me. Customers, bloggers, journalists, podcasters, twitter followers, Mac and iPhone development colleagues, and most significantly at this particular instant, folks like yourself who are bothering to read this post.

Talent and ambition are meaningless in a vacuum. All of us depend on all of us for mutual inspiration and gratification. Let’s make an effort in 2009 to help each other and to thank each other as much as we can.

Let’s kick ass in 2009.

Originally posted by Daniel Jalkut from Red Sweater Blog, on December 31, 2008 1:13 PM

I’m not going to be back everyday again for a little bit longer, but I wanted to ask a question about a card I got for xmas:

It’s one of the Topps Trading Card History cards from this year (well, tomorrow it’ll be from last year, I guess), Cameron Maybin in the style of 1992 Bowman. Quite a boring card.

Now, I was gone from the hobby back in ‘92 so I haven’t seen a lot of 1992 Bowmans in their natural state, but I was wondering if the original set featured a bunch of photos taken in someone’s back yard, and if so, did Topps ever reveal this secret location?

Thanks for the help. See you in ‘09.

      

Originally posted by handcollated from Hand Collated, on December 31, 2008 12:54 PM

New career in public relations not a good option for Alberto Gonzales either.

Originally posted by Josh Marshall from Talking Points Memo, on December 31, 2008 12:31 PM

The end of the year is naturally a time for reflection, and it's even more so for me, what with my birthday wedged in between Christmas and New Years. Two years ago at this time, I'd just quit BusinessWeek-- a job I'd slaved for some eight years to get-- to write my first book. A lot of people thought I was crazy on both counts: It's not like we're swimming in media jobs these days and back in 2006 a lot of people didn't even think the companies in my book would still be in business by 2008. 2007 was a year I had to deliver and prove them all wrong. At least professionally, it was the most exhilarating year of my life. 2008 on the other hand was, well....it was amazing, exhausting, transformative, exciting, terrifying, emotional and well....how the hell was it just one year?

All reporters have to do these dorky year end surveys, quizzes and lists this time of year. I know-- because my SXSW interview has been on seemingly ALL of them. But believe it or not other stuff happened to me too! As I look back on 2008 and get ready for 2009, here's my list of the biggest moments of what I can only call one of the most unimaginable years of my life.

10. Buying a house. I know that sounds materialistic, but my husband is an artist and I'm a writer. We never thought we'd be able to buy a house in San Francisco. The second we saw the house we knew. I sent a note to my realtor that said "We are in love" in the subject line with the address in the body. She replied, "Well, do you want propose or just flirt with it a while?" We wrote up an offer later that day. There were a million points where the deal should have fallen apart-- not the least of which was an exploding credit market.

9. Taking my family and my in laws to Mexico for Thanksgiving. Again, this was one of those things we'd never assume we could do-- for one thing I have a big family! We'll probably never be able to afford it again, but it was worth every penny. I'm incredibly lucky that my family and my in-laws get along so well. It was an idyllic week with perfect weather, water and food.

8. My first grownup keynote. I've been on stage a zillion times but never doing a paid, Power Pointy keynote. I don't know why, but it was terrifying!!! I've sat through so many bad keynotes and I didn't want to be that guy. Also, I kinda felt like a fraud. Why am I up here? I'm just a reporter. I freaked out for months and was so happy when it was done! Huge props to Olivia for helping me through it and to Al Campa for hiring me to do it!

7. April. Before 2008, I'd barely been outside the country. Growing up in a family of seven with parents who are teachers means no cushy summers abroad, unfortunately. But that's only made me appreciate the opportunity to travel more. I spent most of April in London, Cannes and Israel-- three places I'd never been before. London was just pure fun, thanks in no small part to Mr. Robert Loch who I met for the first time on that trip. In Cannes, I was speaking at a conference and had a near-panic attack when the car picked me up at the airport and drove me to a comped 400-euro-a-night hotel. "Who do these people think I am?" Israel was even more amazing, particularly touring Old Jerusalem.  (Even with near-pneumonia.)

6. Launching this blog. Yeah, it's even weird to me: I've been blogging since 2005, but never on my own site. Granted, the blog is a weird mis-mash of a personal diary (ahem, including this navel-gracing post!), a legitimate news blog, and a lifecast. You never quite know what you're going to get here. But it's mine and I love it and I don't care if it ever produces a dime of revenue. Huge props to my illustrator Sophie Askew and web designer Stephanie Chu for building such a beautiful site.

5. SXSW-- really. I've already talked about it in nearly 100 interviews, on stage, on this blog and everywhere else, so I won't belabor it. First off, it was huge in the name recognition department, driving tons of people-- even people who hate me-- to my site, to buy my book, and to every event I hosted. Second, there's something great about low expectations. You have no idea how many times I've heard someone say in a stunned voice, "You know. You're actually not horrible in person!" Third, I've never been one of those people who wished for mind reading abilities. I really just don't want to know. But there is something powerful in knowing every horrible, sexist, offensive, mean thought a mob of people are having about you. There's no mystery and whether you agree or not, you can always learn from it, and become a better person as a result. Fourth, you learn a lot about who your real friends are when it's fashionable to trash you. And last, before SXSW I was getting a lot of accolades. The best way not to believe your own hype is to get publicly brutalized.

4. User Generated Book Tour. In the up-and-down year that was 2008, my book had a great launch and then sales started to slip. I decided on a whim to do a book tour, and it was probably the best business decision I made all year. I've already written a ton about why, but in short I got to meet thousands of entrepreneurs and spend the bulk of my fall outside the Valley's echo chamber after nearly a decade inside of it. Oh, and I sold a bunch of books too.

3. TechTicker launch. It was terrifying and exhilarating all at once. We'd worked so hard for so many months, and it was so great to finally show people how we were reinventing financial video news. I developed a whole new appreciation for the way you can tell a story visually that you never can in words. Also, I gained valuable lessons in hair and makeup. I'm not kidding-- some mornings at 6 a.m. I walk into Yahoo looking homeless, yet somehow manage to look sunny on camera. I'll always remember the first day I shot at the Nasdaq with Henry Blodget. I'd never met him before and was completely charmed within minutes. They also had a big, fancy New York hair and makeup girl who put such heavy eyelashes on me I could barely open my eyes. And after years of watching financial news shows, actually filming at the Nasdaq was surreal. I kept thinking, "I'm just a print reporter! What am I doing here?"

2. Geoff's art auction moment. For all the time I spent putting myself out there in 2008, I never actually had to watch people publicly bid on my work. But my husband did. He killed at SF Camera Work's annual art auction-- one of the only pieces that went for more than the list price. I was so proud of him.

1. Debut of the book. (Duh!) Walking into the opening night party to see so many friends, do all my first signings, and eat "Once You're Lucky" or "Twice You're Good" cupcakes-- that was all just magic and a moment I never thought I'd be lucky (har, har) enough to have. It will always be one of the best moments of my life, probably second only to my wedding.

Thanks to everyone who stood by me, challenged me and defended me in what was an unbelievable year. I'd say, "Here's to a calm 2009," but who am I kidding?

[Photos: Me blogging before my birthday dinner by Geoffrey Ellis; me on the beach in Israel by JD Lassica; screen grab from TT and me walking into my book party by Jim Merithew for Wired.com] 

 

Originally posted by sarah lacy from SarahLacy.com, on December 31, 2008 12:28 PM

a film about a bowling incident (the ball i like makes an appearance at 0:57)

Originally posted by (author unknown) from the real janelle, on December 31, 2008 11:55 AM

First, I’d like to thank each and every one of you for helping make 2008 one of the most successful in BP history. It was an amazing baseball season and we hope our coverage of our sport from every angle helped you enjoy it even more. We’ll strive to do the same in 2009.

Now, I was just curious what everyone’s holiday wish would be for the ONE new feature you’d like to see at BP in 2009 would be. Please, only one per comment and please be at least somewhat realistic. Would you like to see a particular writer added to the team, more video, an iPhone app with all the PECOTA projections, or something else entirely? I’m not promising anything but I am interested in your ideas.

Originally posted by Will Carroll from Baseball Prospectus: Unfiltered, on December 31, 2008 10:45 AM

So, it's taken me FOREVER to decide just whose present was the WORST (or best, although "OMG, WTF, what the hell were they thinking" outweighed "OMG! You didn't!" by about 493 to 1).

A lot of the presents were what I call "bowling ball presents" -- stuff people get you because they want it for themselves (qv: pepperdove getting a VCR ... at age 15 ... when there was only one TV in the house ... after the family VCR broke. Elizabeth getting an air conditioner -- then being told they couldn't afford to install it!). And then some were "I love you, you're perfect, now change" presents. (qv: Riva getting offered laser hair removal! Mickey being given a can of Slim-Fast!)

Then there were a lot of "I don't know what the word "present" means, so I'm going to give you this random item" (like Ann's boyfriend giving her a RED LACE TEDDY FROM A PREVIOUS GIRLFRIEND -- seriously, wtf? -- and Colleen getting a PLASTIC TRAVEL URINAL, Beth B getting PAPERCLIPS, Denise getting USED MAKEUP).

Some presents seem to have been thinly-veiled assassination attempts: MsManners got two bottles of Fen-Phen (from an ex, natch) and Angel getting a basket of hair clips and dollar-store scented soap from her sister-in-law when she A) had no hair after undergoing chemo and B) was highly allergic to everything, which the chemo exacerbated. (I would have pressed charges on that one!)

"I think you must have meant this for someone else" seems to have been another theme -- Neighbourhood.Gal got (at age 11) a Teddy Ruxpin (remember those?) and a remote controlled monster truck and a skateboard (and she lived on a street with no sidewalks). Cookie got what sounded like the Worst Coat in the History of Coats: "VIOLENTLY acid-washed denim, knee-length, lumberjack style jacket with BRIGHT white, puffy fleece lining." Mere got a BOX of DICKIES. In 1987.

I was heartened by all the folks who got ironing boards, dress forms, sewing machines, and sergers ... except for poor RavenzTarot, whose daughter got a new sewing machine (after trashing RavenzTarot's old machine). That machine REALLY should have been Ravenz!

Is it any wonder it was hard to decide? I chose two bads and a good. The good-present-winner is anthrokeight, whose parents had her kindergarten art project of an angel professionally framed ... (altogether now: AWWWWW). The bad-present winners are La BellaDonna, who got a necklace and earrings SUPPOSEDLY from her husband, but since he conveniently didn't have any cash on him when it was time to pay for them, ended up being bought on her own dime ... ... and Sewducky ... well, I can't give you details of what Sewducky got that was so awful, but let's just say this: If you are going to give someone WWII memorabilia as a Christmas present, you might want to pick some FROM THE WINNING SIDE. Just a tip, there. [So, guys, email me your mailing addresses and I'll forward them to Rita so she can send you a copy of that pattern!]

It was SO hard to decide, though, that I am going to give out more prizes. If you left a comment about a bad (or good!) present, email me and I'll send you a free Dress A Day measuring tape! (Let me know what comment was yours, and don't forget to include your mailing address!)

Here's what they look like, iffen you don't remember:








Happy New Year!

Originally posted by Erin from A Dress A Day, on December 31, 2008 10:16 AM

Every year right about now we round up our blogging activity across Google. Ready? Here goes.

This is our 368th post of the year on the main Google blog, which is 23% more than in 2007. In addition to more posts, we are thrilled to know that we have many more readers now — 78% more, to be exact. The number of unique visitors jumped from 6,738,830 last year to more than 12 million (12,000,723) in 2008. And readers are coming from all over: the UK, Canada, India, Australia, Germany, France, Spain, Japan and beyond. The top non-Google referrers are Yahoo, Digg, Reddit, Lifehacker and Slashdot.

We posted quite a bit about new products (10) and new product features (56), but nothing caused as much excitement as our earlier-than-planned unveiling of Google Chrome. This post alone had 1,735,093 unique visitors and generated 12% of our total-year pageviews on the blog! There was also the much-anticipated announcement of the first Android-powered phone. And people enjoyed reading about our design philosophies. Who knew a little change to a favicon would generate such interest?

But it wasn't all just product news; there was much else to cover in 2008. To mark Google's 10th birthday, we took a moment to reflect on the enormous impact the Internet has had on people's lives since our founding. Some of our in-house experts shared their thoughts on how various technologies will evolve in the next 10 years.

Like many of you, we were on the edge of seats watching all of the U.S. election action. We posted 27 times about political subjects, providing information about voting tools, how the political process works, and what was top of mind on Election Day. It's clear that technology will be playing an even bigger role in politics in years to come.

Of course, we had some fun too: We kept our long-standing April Fools' Day tradition going with the announcement of Project Virgle; we covered new ways to get around the Googleplex and the masterminding of a giant Ferris wheel; and we raised our glass to a couple who got married with Google.

And the Google blog network keeps on growing: 44 new blogs launched this year, for a total of 127 active company blogs. A few highlights: eight new developer blogs (the Open Source blog is shining star, with 370,000 unique visitors since its start in February), and 22 new ads-related blogs, nearly half of which are in languages other than English (there are AdSense blogs in Traditional Chinese and Russian; and AdWords blogs in Danish, German, Turkish, French, Russian, Korean, Swedish, Norwegian, Finnish, and Spanish). There's even an Analytics blog in French. And we also welcomed three new regional blogs, for India, Africa, and the Ukraine. Sharing information with people wherever they are in whatever language they speak is a priority for us, and each of these new blogs helps us get a little bit closer to this goal. If the total number of Google blogs makes your head spin, don't worry. We've developed a new blog directory and gadget to help you more easily track news and updates from us.

We're looking forward to another robust year of keeping you informed of all the goings-on at Google. In the meantime, we wish you and yours a very happy New Year.

Posted by Susan Straccia, Google Blog Team

Originally posted by A Googler from The Official Google Blog, on December 31, 2008 9:28 AM

I’ve never done one of these posts and I’m not sure why I’m starting now, but here’s a recap of the year on this is sippey.typepad.com.

First, these were the top five posts based on traffic.

1. Project Management Lingo, where I swiped content from a mailing list, put it in list form and got a link from Kottke.
2. Holy mother of god they’re nuts, where I swiped a video from Vimeo, took five minutes to add a map to it and got links from Waxy and Kottke.
3. We’re here to compete, where I defended Six Apart against charges of playing dirty in the marketplace, and got a link from Matt.
4. Restaurants should do the math for you, where I took five minutes to write up a simple idea I’ve had for years, and got a link from Waxy.
5. Kanye West Album Generator, where I took five minutes to sketch up an idea I stole from Anil (it’s true! I’m a thief!), and I don’t think he even linked to me.

Note to self: if optimizing for traffic, then write more lists and/or link bait. On the flip side, here are five of my favorite posts that weren’t big traffic magnets.

1. Casual carpool, serendipity and radovan kardzic is a telling of a trip across the Bay Bridge that made my week.
2. Wanted, friends for the js-909, which still has me thinking about how small a unit of media can be. If Kuler can turn the simple color swatch into the point of reference for a community, why not drum patterns?
3. Notes on the death of Hal Riney mourned the loss of the golden-throated ad man, and posited that there’s no way in hell those Saturn ads would work today.
4. Upgrading your television is too hard, in which I posed a simple question — how the hell do I switch to HD? — and had a ton of interesting people with great ideas chimed in. I still need to write the follow up post.
5. Next up, our own executive chef is just a time lapse video of Mena Trott cutting David Recordon’s hair.

As if the difference between the top five in traffic and my fave five weren’t stark enough, I’ll make it abundantly clear: I blog for me, and I don’t really blog about anything in particular…other than what I think is interesting enough to blog about. If I were optimizing for pageviews, there’d be more lists, more link bait and possibly more posts about the relationship between attention and authority. Or authority and followers. Or the attention span of idiot land. Or something.

OK, then! Here’s a fancy data visualization of my posting activity by month. This’ll drive the page views:

Jan +++++++++++++++++++
Feb +++++++++++++
Mar +++++++++++++++
Apr +++++++
May ++++++++
Jun ++++++++++++
Jul ++++++++++
Aug ++++++++++++
Sep +++++++++++++++++++
Oct +++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Nov +++++++++++++++++
Dec +++++++++++++++++++++ (est.)

And since the world is made up of more than ordered lists, here’s an unordered list for you. (I know, breathe deep.)

• I probably redesigned the site about eighteen times this year. Not only do I have a short attention span, but I also like mucking with the new design capabilities that we’re bringing to TypePad.
• For a while I was auto-posting links from Delicious, but I realized that I hate it when other bloggers do that on their site / feed, so I stopped doing that.
• Blogging is part of a mix of how an individual can participate online. My (Movable Type-powered) action stream at sippey.com is a view into all the sharing, favoriting, posting, saving and tweeting activity I’m doing. But to play to a recent meme, it’s on my blog where I have home field advantage.
• I’m more heterogenous in how I’m blogging lately — some posts by email, some posts from the TypePad web UI, some posts via the TextMate blogging bundle, some posts from the TypePad iPhone app. Fred Wilson’s latest post about how his Blackberry is his own personal fountain pen has me inspired to do more off the cuff posting by email, but it’ll probably take me all year to get half as good at it as he is.
• Goal for 2009: 365 days, 365 posts. There may be some days with one post, and some days with more, but I’d love to get back into that rhythm.

And scene.

Originally posted by Michael Sippey from this is sippey.typepad.com, on December 31, 2008 8:59 AM

I was a little scared to open the computer today. My crew-- which is sadly now just one person thanks to Yahoo's layoffs-- was working on a blooper reel of me that I wasn't allowed to see until it posted today.  As usual, Brad did an amazing job, especially considering how hard it is to find clips of me messing up that don't involve a string of expletives. What resulted is actually a pretty sweet highlight reel of my first year trying to learn to be on camera after a decade of print reporting-- something I long said I'd never do. A few things jump out at me watching this-- but the biggest is how much younger I look in the clips from a year ago! 2008 has aged me!

Perhaps it's the wide-eyed excitement that makes me look young. It wasn't just learning to report in a new medium, we were creating a new platform for financial video news. We all thought freeing the videos from a set broadcast schedule, making them embeddable and available on demand would change how people consume financial news, but TechTicker has outperformed even the most optimistic projections. On our peak days, we see several million streams, and the interview I did with Sue Decker just after Microsoft walked away from its offer did several million streams on its own. Other favorite interviews have included Richard Branson, Dean Kamen, and of course, Zach Nelson, the day Netsuite had finally gone public.

Who knows how long I'll do TechTicker or how long anyone will with the uncertainty around Yahoo, but I am really happy I have this clip to remember the frustrations and fun times of helping launch a new video show during such a pivotal year in my life. Enjoy!

Originally posted by sarah lacy from SarahLacy.com, on December 31, 2008 8:16 AM

Closing night at Florent

And that's our show, friends. Our retrospective on the year is here: Top Meals, Top Neighborhoods, Top Standbys, Top Newcomers, Biggest Surprises, Defining Words, and Headline Predictions for 2009. And if that isn't enough, go play in the 2008 sandbox for a few more minutes. Behold: Shitshow Week, The Year in Ko, and go play with the Zak-O-Matic. See you 2009.

Originally posted by BL from Eater, on December 31, 2008 8:00 AM

Whoever first made sausages was a genius. They took pieces of meat that they perhaps weren’t going to use right away, or at all, and combined them with spices and/or herbs, finally stuffing them into another part of the animal that might not otherwise get used. The result? Delicious.

After thinking about making sausages for almost a year, I finally did it. And it wasn’t nearly as difficult as I thought it would be.

I’ve been wanting to make sausages since I bought a quarter of a pig from my CSA (several months ago) and especially since my wife bought me copy of Michael Ruhlman’s “Charcuterie.” The clincher was when, in celebration of getting married, my mother-in-law gave me a Kitchen-Aid stand mixer and some other family friends got me some of the attachments that go with it, most notably the meat grinder and sausage stuffer.

I had been slightly intimidated by the notion of making my own sausages, but in the end, all it really involves is combining some spices and herbs with freshly ground pork and then stuffing it into casings. What could go wrong? Even if I screwed up the stuffing process, I’d still have great tasting sausage that I can make into patties or cook with at will, mixing it into sauces, etc.

To prepare, I re-read the sausage chapter in “Charcuterie,” browsed a couple of European sausage websites, and finally emailed Bob Del Grosso, who was Ruhlman’s instructor at the CIA and taught him much of what he knows and writes so well about. Del Grosso is no longer at the CIA, but now works on a farm and is making his own charcuterie. I urge you to read his blog, which is a true inspiration for good living. The reason I emailed Bob Del Grosso was not that I mistrusted Ruhlman’s advice, but that my wife really loves maple sausages and “Charcuterie” offered no such recipe .

Bob gladly gave me some advice, which was pretty similar to the information culled from Charcuterie, as well as a maple sausage recipe to work from. So, my sausage journey began. Making sausages is done in stages, so I tackled each stage separately, focusing on what needed to be done, and hoping not to screw up. The stages are: grinding the meat, mixing the meat, and finally stuffing the sausages.

I decided to use two cuts from my pig: a shank and a roast (that’s the roast at right). Some cooks would balk at the use of these particular cuts, and they might insist that you make sausages only from scraps, but a great sausage is made from great ingredients, and these were great ingredients. Besides, these were just about the only two pieces we had not yet eaten. Regardless, my wife is not really interested in eating big slabs of roasted meat. She lived 17 years of her life as a vegetarian and now eats meat, but usually only when it is properly sourced, and usually ground or smoked in some way so as not to resemble a big slab of meat. So, if my wife wants sausages, I will gladly oblige.

The two cuts of pork weighed in at 6 lbs, so I adjusted my recipes accordingly. I decided to make two types of sausage: a maple sausage and a variation of fresh garlic sausage.

The maple sausage was simple: for each pound of meat, I added 0.3 ounces of kosher salt, 0.5 ounces of maple syrup, and about a tablespoon of ground sage, returning the meat to the freezer to chill. After frying up a small portion, we added a bit more maple syrup and sage.

The other sausage was a little more complicated. I started with the fresh garlic sausage recipe from “Charcuterie,” but after frying up a small patty of it, we decided that it needed more flavour. I added a mixture of sauteed minced onion and button mushrooms (chilled before adding to the meat), and also some paprika, turmeric, black pepper, and brown sugar. I did not measure these ingredients, but used my senses, and some common sense (read Ruhlman’s entry in “The Elements of Cooking” on common sense). We fried a small patty and decided that it tasted great. The meats went back into the freezer until the next stage: stuffing.

I got some lamb casings from an organic butcher at Jean-Talon market, which is a quasi-farmers market within walking distance of our apartment. I chose lamb casings because I wanted thinner sausages that could be used for breakfasts and brunches. The butcher charged me $4 for two casings (I ended up using only one of them). Stuffing the sausages was a two-person job, so my wife pitched in at this point.

I fed the meat into the machine while my wife made sure that the sausages were being stuffed properly. It took some practice, but we got the hang of it. We ended up with about 25 5-inch maple sausages and half as many of the other sausages that were twice as long. All of the sausages went into the freezer except one nice looking coil that we had for dinner, fried, and served with mashed potatoes and rutabagas, and broccoli.

I am happy I made sausages and will definitely make it a part of my life. It may be difficult to eat store-bought sausage from now on.

Next challenge: sauerkraut.

Related: “Pignorance is not bliss: A weekend making salumi“

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Originally posted by Peter aka Nosher of the North from The Ethicurean: Chew the right thing., on December 31, 2008 8:00 AM

Back in June, 2008, Egypt helped broker a 6-month cease-fire agreement between Israel and Hamas, the ruling body in the Gaza Strip. Though the cease-fire was broken several times by both sides, it largely held. Toward the end of the cease-fire in December, Israel, while closing Gaza's borders since November, indicated that it might extend the agreement, if Hamas ceased all Qassam rocket attacks. Qassam rockets are the crude but deadly homemade missiles often launched towards Israeli territory (over 3,000 times in 2008 alone). Hamas leaders, angered by the blockade and seemingly little political headway made over the past 6 months, recently stepped up rocket attacks on Israel once again. Israel has now responded with five days (so far) of air attacks and Naval bombardment on Gaza, resulting in over 350 dead, nearly 1,500 wounded and countless buildings and smugglers' tunnnels destroyed. Hamas has threatened to increase the rocket attacks send suicide bombers into Israel in retaliation, and Israel is massing troops and tanks around Gaza for a possible ground assault. (37 photos total)

A trail of smoke is seen after the launch of a rocket from the northern Gaza Strip aimed towards Israel on December 27, 2008. (REUTERS/Baz Ratner)

Originally posted by (author unknown) from The Big Picture, on December 31, 2008 7:38 AM

Last October, I talked about the new Grace Jones record. Now, La Grace, always in control of her image gets mass produced in chocolate for her latest album “Hurricane”. Designed and art directed by Tom Hingston Studios and shot by Jonathan De Villiers, the popstar returns to the scene as a sweet audio-visual commodity. See the process at Creative Review.

Originally posted by Jocko from Jockohomo Datapanik, ReBlogged by Roddy on Dec 31, 2008 at 12:05 PM

Originally posted by Jocko from Eyebeam reBlog, on December 31, 2008 7:05 AM

Though much of the architectural world focused on massive undertakings at the Summer Olympics, Beijing didn't have a monopoly on the creative buildings of 2008. Of the many structures that graced Cool Hunting's bandwidth this year, a handful stood out from the pack.

Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center
Recently opened at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, NY, the EMPAC fuses the best aspects of the arts, science and technology. The building—which features a theater, concert hall and audio/video production studios—is meant to foster creative pursuits among artists, visiting scholars, researchers, engineers and designers. Designed by the British firm, Grimshaw, the EMPAC's eye-catching exterior and curved-cedar core are a sight to behold.

East Beach Cafe
British designer Thomas Heatherwick took a site-specific approach with this beachside eatery. Looking more like oversized flotsam than a business, the East Beach Cafe has made a a serious tourist destination out of the sleepy English town of Littlehampton.

Kraanspoor
Taking the concept of adaptive reuse to new heights, Dutch architect Trude Hooykaas used an old dock to create a modern office building. The cantilevered glass exterior both allow occupants to regulate temperatures and reduces heating and cooling costs.

Portland's Clinton Condominiums
Situated in a tony corner of Southeast Portland, the Clinton Condominiums take the place of a former industrial building. The building's minimal interiors combine attractive design with eco-consciousness in a way that's right at home in the Pacific Northwest.

Abilmo Pop-Up Hotel Rooms
Though they measure a paltry 130 square feet, these mobile hotel rooms include everything necessary for a night's stay, from bed to bathroom facilities. Heavily insulated for both temperature and noise, the Abilmo rooms can make almost any environment habitable.

Originally posted by Doug Black from Cool Hunting, ReBlogged by Roddy on Dec 31, 2008 at 12:01 PM

Originally posted by Doug Black from Eyebeam reBlog, on December 31, 2008 7:01 AM

We at Archinect like to fondly look back as each year comes to a close. This year we've decided to take a slightly different approach. Instead of rounding up the greatest hits from 2008, we're moving ahead and setting our sights toward the future, with a collection of predictions for 2009. We've asked a group of architects, bloggers, academics, Archinect editors, and other members of our community to provide some of their own personal insight to help visualize what we're in for in the coming year.

2009 Prediction, by Barry Lehrman Barry is a contributing editor for archinect who resides in the minneaple. » Read Barry Lehrman's '09 Predictions

2009 Prediction, by Benjamin Ball Benjamin Ball is a partner in the Los Angeles-based integrated design and fabrication practice Ball-Nogues Studio. » Read Benjamin Ball's '09 Predictions

2009 Prediction, by Bryan Boyer Bryan Boyer is an architect who thinks he's a programmer and a programmer who moonlights as an architect. As Senior Editor at Archinect.com since 2004, Boyer pursues his literary fascination with 'the mundane.' » Read Bryan Boyer's '09 Predictions

2009 Prediction, by Dan Hill Dan Hill is the blogger behind City of Sound and a senior consultant at Arup. British. Born Zürich. Based in Sydney. » Read Dan Hill's '09 Predictions

2009 Prediction, by Donna Sink Donna Sink is an architect who considers herself fortunate to be surrounded, via Archinect, by superstars. » Read Donna Sink's '09 Predictions

Emily's 2009 Predictions: The Tale of Obama and the Thread Central Heroes, by Emily Kemper Emily Kemper is a graduate student at USC's School of Architecture. View her Archinect School Blog here. » Read Emily Kemper's '09 Predictions

The Future, Circa 1931 , by Enrique Ramirez Enrique Ramirez is a former Archinect school blogger and is the editor of a456, a quasi-architectural website.  His most recent article, "Erich Mendelsohn at War" appears in Perspecta 41: Grand Tour (MIT Press 2008).  Enrique is currently working on his PhD at Princeton University. » Read Enrique Ramirez's '09 Predictions

2009 Prediction, by Evan Geisler Evan Geisler is a MSc Real Estate 1st Year Graduate at The University of Hong Kong » Read Evan Geisler's '09 Predictions

2009 Prediction, by Fred Scharmen Fred Scharmen takes photos, draws pictures, conducts research, attends committee meetings, writes about things, and designs buildings in Baltimore, Maryland. » Read Fred Scharmen's '09 Predictions

Foreclosing cities, by Javier Arbona Javier is a PhD candidate in geography at the University of California, Berkeley. He has a background in architecture and urbanism. » Read Javier Arbona's '09 Predictions

2009 Prediction, by Jeffrey Inaba Jeffrey Inaba heads LA-based Inaba Projects. He is also the Director of C-Lab and Features Editor of Volume. » Read Jeffrey Inaba's '09 Predictions

Victory Gardens, or the Impact of the Financial Crisis on Architecture, by Kazys Varnelis Kazys Varnelis is the Director of the Network Architecture Lab at the Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation. » Read Kazys Varnelis's '09 Predictions

Predictions for 2009. In Point Form!, by Marcus Trimble Marcus Trimble is a registered architect in Sydney, Australia, and set up Super Colossal in June 2007. Prior to going into private practice, Marcus was an associate at BVN and prior to that was at Lahz Nimmo Architects. » Read Marcus Trimble's '09 Predictions

2009 Prediction, by Markus Miessen Markus Miessen is an architect, researcher, educator and writer, based in London and Berlin. » Read Markus Miessen's '09 Predictions

2009, it’s going to be ugly., by Michiel van Raaij Michiel van Raaij currently works as managing editor for AWM, a Dutch periodical on architecture, and is the editor of Eikongraphia. » Read Michiel van Raaij's '09 Predictions

With Apologies to Paul Valery and Yogi Berra, by Mimi Zeiger Mimi Zeiger founded loud paper, an architecture zine and now blog, in 1997. A Brooklyn-based freelancer, she writes on art, architecture, and design. Her latest book, Tiny Houses, is due out in March. » Read Mimi Zeiger's '09 Predictions

2009 Prediction, by Nam Henderson Ex grad-student. Friend of architects. Lover of design. Professional interests; Sustainability, teaching, learning, religions and their connections to sustainable narratives » Read Nam Henderson's '09 Predictions

2009 Prediction, by Nick Sowers Nick is an M.Arch student at UC Berkeley, traveling on a fellowship in 2009 to study militarized space around the world. » Read Nick Sowers's '09 Predictions

2009 and I, A First Hand Conversation with The New Year, by Orhan Ayyüce b. Izmir, Turkey. Makes up buildings and stories all the time from Los Angeles. Orhan is a Senior Editor on Archinect, and also publishes his own blog elseplace » Read Orhan Ayyüce's '09 Predictions

2009: A Year of Critical Activism?, by Quilian Riano Quilian is an Archinect Senior Editor and Harvard GSD blogger. » Read Quilian Riano's '09 Predictions

Originally from Archinect.com Feed, ReBlogged by Roddy on Dec 31, 2008 at 11:58 AM

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Eyebeam reBlog, on December 31, 2008 6:58 AM

By Anne E. Kornblut When the Obamas move to Washington over the weekend they will take up residence at the Hay-Adams Hotel, the storied, luxury hotel on Lafayette Park, within walking distance of the White House. President-elect Barack Obama, currently on vacation in Hawaii, will bring his wife, Michelle, and daughters, Sasha and Malia, to town at some point this weekend, transition officials said; Sidwell, where both girls will be attending, starts school next week. And for a few weeks, they will live in close proximity to the White House -- first at the Hay Adams, and then, starting Jan. 15, a few steps closer, at Blair House, the presidential guest house. The Hay-Adams, at 16th and H Sts. NW, has 145 rooms and 20 suites; its restaurant is a regular meeting spot for White House officials in any administration. And its bar is, fittingly for the no-leak Obama team,

Originally posted by (author unknown) from 44, on December 31, 2008 6:48 AM

A short while back the Fed announced a new program to buy up to $600 billion worth of mortgage backed securities. Remember, this was what the TARP was originally supposed to do. But then Paulson decided to invest money directly into the banks to recapitalize them. And then the Fed decided on its own to do basically the same thing on its own. They've already bought up $100 billion worth and they've now hired BlackRock, Goldman Sachs, PIMCO and Wellington Management Company to purchase and manage $500 billion more worth of the stuff.

Why did these four companies get the contract? That's none of your business. The Fed just decided. Says the Fed, "The selection criteria were based on the institution's operational capacity, size, overall experience in the MBS (mortgage-backed securities) market and a competitive fee structure." In other words, these guys are the ones who know how to do it. But no public process, criteria or anything else.

Their purported knowledge, which I'm sure is true in a sense of technical experience, is somewhat belied by the fact that these were the firms that helped build up the mess in the first place.

And, think you get a decent commission for managing half a trillion dollars of assets? Yeah. Me too.

Originally posted by Josh Marshall from Talking Points Memo, on December 31, 2008 6:43 AM

Quick Post

The app looks great and gives a list of all articles tagged with the names of your elected officials.

http://prototype.nytimes.com/represent/

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Capn Design, on December 31, 2008 4:45 AM

Le Bern, baby. Photo by Daniel Krieger.

In lieu of a review this week, the Bruni files his year end wrap, therein naming Momofuku Ko Best New Restaurant, the Ko frozen foie gras the Dish of the Year and a lunch at Le Bernardin his Meal of the Year. On Le Bern:

Each dimension of every dish sang with the exact pitch and volume that the chef Eric Ripert had no doubt intended. He’s a maestro, and his kitchen a finely tuned orchestra, and I could happily lose myself in their music every day.

Corton, Scarpetta, Convivio and Dovetail round out the Bruni's top 5 newcomers. Even Cabrito got some BruniLove:

The year ushered in many opportunities for great eating at contained prices, though I suspect in this one sense 2009 may outpace 2008. It will have its work cut out for it, because in addition to Porchetta, Gottino and Terroir, there’s Cabrito, whose best dishes — including the carnitas with salsa verde and the roasted poblano peppers in cream — match those at just about any Mexican restaurant in New York.

By the numbers, the Bruni notes broadly that 2008 was the best year for New York restaurants since 2004, when both Per Se and Masa came on the scene. He awarded 7 new restaurants 3 stars in 2008, as compared to zero in 2007. · Same Table Next Year? Not So Fast [NYT]

Originally posted by BL from Eater, on December 31, 2008 3:34 AM

All right. Sadly we have come to the end the basketball poetry on Cardboard Junkie. These final two poems were composed by Madding of Cards on Cards. Madding is a huge Blazers fan so it's appropriate he got the pair of Portlanders.


Tom, a tall baller
Tough to replace Walton
Peak of his career

Brewer was a bust
His son should do him proud
Too bad the Jazz suck


Two heartfelt haikus from a Blazers fan. that's it for the poetry folks, if you want more then get writing!

Originally posted by dayf from Cardboard Junkie, on December 31, 2008 2:57 AM

Stewart posted a photo:

Originally posted by Stewart from Sylloge, on December 31, 2008 2:24 AM

Songs I've had in heavy rotation in 2008: [1] New Schools: The Sea and Cake, [2] Official: Q-Tip, [3] Athene: Hercules and Love Affair, [4] I'm Still Waiting: Bob Marley, [5] Wait for the Summer: Yeasayer, [6] Baltimore: Nina Simone, [7] Onde Eu Nasci Passa Um Rio: Caetano Veloso, [8] Shake It Off: Kelly Makeda, [9] Move: CSS, [10] Tropical Island: Melpo Mene, [11] Do For The Others: Crosby, Stills & Nash, [12] Into Brooklyn, Early in the Morning: The Innocence Mission. *ENJOY!

Originally posted by Abby from HI + LOW, on December 31, 2008 2:21 AM

helvetica documentary - blu-ray packaging, 2008

more helvetica than you can shake a stick at - experimental jetset have (finally) updated their site.
an extensive online archive now features projects, interviews and writings from 2008 back to 1996.



poster for 'DTC - wilde end' stage show, 2008



invitation to an event at the stedelijk museum celebrating the 80th birthday of wim crowel, 2008


brochure for '3KA' production, 2006


signage systems for 'le cent quatre 2', 2008

experimental jetset: http://www.jetset.nl

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Designboom - Weblog, on December 31, 2008 2:10 AM

A very short list of my top five iPhone applications of the year...

• Tweetie - Twitter was made for mobile interaction. There are many great Twitter iPhone apps out there. Twitteriffic is gorgeous. Tweetsville has a great UI. But Tweetie just beats theem all in speed and stability. After it gets a little makeover and fixes the UI of the direct messages... Tweetie will be set.

• Collapse! Chaos - When Apple first announced software development on the iPhone, Collapse was the first game I thought of. Man, I love the general concept of this game. Its a bit slower (in style) than it is normally, but, I'm still happy they brought it to the iPhone.

• BlocksClassic - It might be the simplest game on the planet, but I play it all the time. Its great for when you're waiting around for five minutes.

• Tris (no longer available) - Tetris might just be the most perfect game ever for portable gaming (or for any platform). But of course the iPhone's Tetris game is pricey and slow. Tris was perfect... simple, quick, free, and very pretty. Unfortunately Tris was forced to disappear. :(

• Klick - I find myself using Klick more and more. Klick makes Flickr viable for the iPhone. Period.

• Bonus - NetShare ( no longer available) - This should really be at the top. Those of us who were lucky enough to get it while it was available know why its so awesome. When you're stuck without internet and your laptop, it is just priceless.

Originally posted by Liz from Lather Rinse Repeat, on December 31, 2008 1:47 AM

Photo by Joi Ito, Design by Matsuichi

While 2008 was a tough year for everyone, it was full of surprises and interesting connections. The most interesting connection was that Mizuka and I finally got married after living together for ten years. (See joi.ito.com/weblog/2008/12/03/we-got-married.html )

In 2008, I began to explore the Middle East and decided that complete immersion was the only way to do it right. This New Year's card is being sent from Dubai where I will be moving my residence and base from 2009.

I am really looking forward to an exciting and "changeful" 2009 with all of you and hope to continue my journey to find happiness for myself and you, my increasingly global community of friends.

Longer post about Dubai later...

Originally posted by Joi from Joi Ito's Web, on December 31, 2008 1:03 AM

I was wondering when someone would express this sentiment. From the Serious Eats inbox ...

Why the fuck did I read your site all year when it turns out I can just tune in this week and get an entire year's worth of shit in my RSS feeder? Enough with the damn reviews clogging things up. I can't find the new material for all this review shit. Stop it. Stop it now!

—Holli
on vacation with a damn Google reader clogged with stuff I've already seen

------------------------------------------------------------
Dear Holli,

The time between Christmas and New Year's Day is a slow period for almost any media outlet that publishes on a daily or weekly schedule. After all, like you, we want a vacation, too. ;)

So we, like other publications, work ahead of time in early December to prepare these endless year-in-review items that we can schedule for posting while we're enjoying the holidays with our family and friends.

Tired of "The Year That Was"? We're not! So until we return you to your regularly scheduled programming, use this special feed from Yahoo! Pipes to filter it out.

But it's not just an easy way to generate content and mindlessly go on autopilot. I know I've had a blast looking through the archives of Serious Eats and all its subsites, and I think my co-eater Alaina Browne here summed it up nicely: "It's a great view into the breadth of the Serious Eats beat and the memes and themes that emerged, and a fun way to revisit some of our favorite and most popular posts."

I'm happy that you've read the site so thoroughly and remember everything on it so well that these Year That Was posts are all old hat to you. We love readers like you! But lots of our community members don't have the same steel-trap mind (I know I don't—I had forgotten about a lot of the content we covered this year). Moreover, we've grown so much over the year that much of what we've covered is new to a lot of readers.

Look, I know it can be frustrating. I was watching CNN last night while they did a 2008 campaign wrap-up. I was totally all, "SEEN IT!" and changed the channel.

I wouldn't go so far as asking you to tune out until Monday, when we'll be through all the retrospectives we've got in the works, but I just took some time to make you a special feed using Yahoo! Pipes. Here you go: Serious Eats "The Year That Wasn't". You can go to that page and add the special feed to your Google Reader.

Since you're clamoring for some new material, I'll see if Kerry is available at this hour to mix you up one of her New Year's Eve Champagne cocktails. Look for it in two and two, then have a sip, and relax.

Seriously,
Adam

For Lovers of The Year That Was

Nagging Questions
Food Photography
Ed Levine's Serious Diet
Rest in Peace: Obituaries
Food Video Games
TYTW in Burgers
Stop-Motion Food Videos
Pizza
Food as Other Stuff
TYTW on Serious Eats New York
Movies
Food in Space
Food Media
Food Shortages, Scares, and Rising Costs
Videos
Science
Starbucks
Bacon
The Top Talk Posts of 2008
The Top 10 Posts on Serious Eats
The Top 8 Posts on Slice
The Top 10 Posts on A Hamburger Today

Originally posted by Adam Kuban from Serious Eats, on December 30, 2008 7:15 PM

In November 2008, I was interviewed by Britt Bravo for her show, Big Vision Podcast. She interviewed me about my artistic vision, process, and new book, Reproduce & Revolt, which I did in collaboration with fellow Just Seeds artist, Josh MacPhee. The interview is great! I talk about growing up in an immigrant family, about how working with youth inspires me, and about how artists have to rethink models of how we engage with the public.
You can click here to listen!

Britt Bravo specializes in telling, and helping others to tell, stories about creating social change. The East Bay Express, named her the Best Podcaster/Blogger Most Dedicated to Social Change in 2007.

Originally posted by Favianna from Just Seeds: Blog, on December 30, 2008 6:03 PM

Filed under: Rumors, iPod touch

Citing "three independent sources close to Apple" including "one source that has actually held the [prototype] device," TechCrunch is stepping into the pre-Macworld Expo rumor fray with the possibility of a large-format iPod touch device coming in the fall of next year. The hypothetical MegiPod would sport a 7" or 9" screen and, naturally, play media content and run apps from the iTunes App Store. Production conversations are ramping up now, say TC sources.

Why an iTablet, and why now? The post cites the presence of the App Store as the primary determinant that the market is ready for a touchable Apple product in supersized form: "Apple has been experimenting internally with large form tablet devices for years, one source says, but there was concern that users wouldn't like the device. The difference now is the iTunes app store, which has thousands of games and other applications that are perfect for a touch screen device with an accelerometer." TechCrunch says the big pod may not be a done deal, as we've seen a zillion Apple tablet rumors come and go -- but that Apple is still planning to move forward, this time.

I'm not sure I would personally be in the market for a 7-inch, unpocketable iPod touch with the text input system featured on present-day devices; however, the expanded screen real estate and advances in the touch tech might combine to make a true typeable surface with room to finger-breathe. The more pressing question, then: since it's hard enough now to keep other commuters and bystanders from peeking over your shoulder to see what you're watching -- how much worse would it be with that massive screen?

Meanwhile, we've made a conscious effort to steer clear of the other Macworld-related rumor today, floated by Gizmodo and irately attacked by CNBC. Whatever the source and whatever the motives, publishing unconfirmed Steve's-health stories is (as we've seen) not a particularly prudent game to play.

TUAWRumor watch: TechCrunch says large-format iPod touch in 2009 originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Tue, 30 Dec 2008 21:11:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

Originally posted by Michael Rose from The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW), on December 30, 2008 4:11 PM

Tony Hawk on Japanese television in 1984 (part 1) by Tony Hawk

Forbes has named skate champion Tony Hawk the third most influential athlete in the world beating out other sports megastars such as baller Shaquille O'Neal, race car driver Dale Earnhardt Jr., and multi-Olympic gold medalist swimmer Michael Phelps. Aside from his winning slab superstature, Tony's rise in influence and fame rose with the help from the blockbuster videogame franchise, Tony Hawk's Pro Skater -- a game my husband Silvio is proud to have been the lead artist for, for the first couple of iterations. What a long way, skateboarding has come. And videogames too.

Good pal and tech journalist Daniel Terdiman interviewed Tony for cNet. Tony talks about technology, entertainment, charity-work, and skateboarding. He says, "More kids are skating than playing little league now... the same cities that are discouraging them aren't providing facilities for them. So I wanted to help bridge that gap and provide skate parks in low-income cities." Huh, really?! Wow, cool!

Originally posted by hustler of culture from hustler of culture, on December 30, 2008 2:47 PM

Blog Manifesto

1. I believe that food matters. Everything about it, from how it was grown, how it was prepared (with resentment or love? patience or hurry?), how it was consumed (with fear or with gusto?). It all counts.
2. I believe that what you put in your body is more important, and worth more time, effort, and money, than what you put on it. (Which is not to say that I don’t believe in clothes—because I do.)
3. For reasons I can’t quite explain, I think it’s important to prepare your own food. At least sometimes.
4. I believe that people who work in restaurants lie about using MSG. Scratch that: I know they do.
5. I believe that when people say they hate a certain food, it’s because they haven’t had a good version of that food. The only exception to this rule is Colman Andrews, who even if you don’t know him is the best food writer there is, and in many direct and not so direct ways has shaped the way we think and write about food, claims to hate eggs. Seeing as how he is lavished with the best dishes that chefs have to offer in the best restaurants in the world, I have to think that he has in fact been presented with good eggs, cooked well. I don’t, however know that he has tried them. I think he is just stubborn.
6. I think that Americans make better Italian food than Italians. So sue me.
7. I also think that American coffee is better than espresso.
8. Though I do believe that eating is a sensual pleasure, and that eating with someone you love is an important ritual in any kind of relationship, I do not think that food has any business in the bedroom. (Except maybe crackers in bed.) Show me a woman who really and truly wants hot fudge licked out of her belly button and I will show you a woman who just wants to be loved.
9. I think that if parents quit negotiating with their children about how many bites of food they eat, the children would not starve—and we’d all be the better for it.
10. I believe that if you are going to eat animals, you should be willing to admit that they are animals, and to look that fact in the wild green eyes. Taking an animal’s meat off the bone, removing its skin, packing it in Styrofoam, and blanketing it with sauce after it has been cooked doesn’t mean said animal was not a live, thinking, breathing, loving animal before he was your dinner.
11. I believe that being “into” sustainability is like smoking pot but not inhaling. You have to commit. Anything short of that is decoration. A Chino Ranch Alpine strawberry atop your lemon tart does not sustainable make.
12. Along those lines, I believe that The City Bakery is one of the best places on Earth. They do it quietly. They do it consistently.
13. I believe that Oprah will never keep her weight off as long as she eats low-fat foods. It means that her head is still in the wrong place.
14. I believe personal trainers and nutritionists are like pharmaceutical drug salesmen. While they may have their heads in the right place (and they may not), they perpetuate a way of thinking that is ultimately harmful to our physical and emotional well being.
15. I believe that any good dish prepared with foam, Pop Rocks, or cotton candy would be better without it.

      

Originally posted by carolynncarreno from what's eating carolynn, on December 30, 2008 1:52 PM

It's going to be a new political world starting next month. And TPM is hiring two new reporter-bloggers to report on location, everyday from Washington, DC to bring you the whole story. We're going to bring to the task all the innovation, integrity and creativity we've become known for in our other projects. And in today's episode of TPMtv we give you an overview of what we have in store and ask for your advice, pointers, suggestions and more on how to best do the job ..

Full-size video at TPMtv.com.

Originally posted by Josh Marshall from Talking Points Memo, on December 30, 2008 1:46 PM

Please (re-)visit Dan Cook's seminal Nintendo's Genre Innovation Strategy essay from 2005. It's chock-full of his signature revelatory insights, in this case inspired by the excitement and skepticism surrounding the announcement of the controller for the Nintendo Wii (then known as the Revolution).

Among many other inspired moments, Dan offers up, early in the piece, two key points.

• The increasingly hardcore nature of the game industry is causing a contraction of the industry.
• New intuitive controller options will result in innovative game play that will bring new gamers into the fold.

He goes on to describe the evolution of individual genres within the gaming industry, reaching a conclusion that was surprising to me, but that intuitively felt correct upon re-reading:

As the less hardcore players burn out on the game mechanics of their favorite genres, they too are at risk of leaving the game market. The result is a steady erosion of the genre’s population.

What is left is a very peculiar group of highly purified hardcore players. They demand rigorous standardization of game mechanics and have highly refined criteria for judging the quality of their titles. With each generation of titles in the genre, they weed out a few more of the weaker players.

This made me think of the recent innovations around the iPhone and, particularly, the games that have been created for the iPhone app store. Prior to the iPhone's release, high-end mobile phones had, essentially, become a really specific gaming genre, catering to hardcore "players", consisting of tech reviewers and industry analysts whose tastes had evolved as all genres must. "They demand rigorous standardization of game mechanics and have highly refined criteria for judging the quality of their titles. With each generation of titles in the genre, they weed out a few more of the weaker players."

The iPhone was about Nintendo-style innovation, applying the same rules that Nintendo has, and achieving a quite Nintendo-like result of producing a device that is fun, satisfying, and very inexpensive to develop innovative games for. As Dan says about Nintendo's history of innovating in controllers:

One of the easiest ways of creating a new genre is to invent a new series of verbs (or risk mechanics as I called them in my Genre Life Cycle articles). One of the easiest ways of inventing new verbs is to create new input opportunities. Nintendo controls their hardware and they leverage this control to suit their particular business model.

And this is exactly what Nintendo has done historically. The original Dpad, the analog stick, the shoulder buttons, the C-stick, the DS touch pad, link capabilities, the tilt controller, the bongo drums…the list goes on and on.

The touchscreen and tilt sensor in the iPhone are just another in the series of controller innovations, and they've yielded the results that these inventions always do. Only, instead of Mario being the brand that benefits from this new set of verbs, Apple is the brand that benefits.

And all of this confirms my suspicion that the iPod and iPhone are not only designed to be subscription hardware that you repurchase constantly, but that Apple is deliberately creating their devices so that the only way you can level up in this game is by buying a new iPod or iPhone.

It's worth concluding with one of Dan's final points:

Nintendo’s strategy of pursuing innovation benefits the entire industry. It brings in new audiences and creates new genres that provide innovative and exciting experiences. The radical new controller is a great example of this strategy in action.

Surprisingly, this also benefits Microsoft and it benefits Sony. As the years pass, the hard core publishers that serve mature genres will adopt previously innovative genres and commoditize them. Their profits will be less, but they’ll keep a lot of genre addicts very happy. Everybody wins when a game company successfully innovates.

I see both of these strategies as a necessary and expected part of a vibrant and growing industry. Industries need balance and Nintendo is a major force of much needed innovation that prevents industry erosion and decline.

According to Amazon's account of holiday bestsellers, "Nintendo Wii dominated the top sellers in video games and hardware including the Wii console, the Wii remote controller and the Wii nunchuk controller." Worldwide sales of the Wii are nearly equal to sales of the Microsoft XBox 360 and Sony Playstation 3 combined.

Originally posted by Anil from Anil Dash, on December 30, 2008 1:14 PM

The news that Alexei Cherepanov died at the age of 19 shocked the hockey world, but the news today that Cherepanov’s death was the result of doping sends a bigger pall over the game. All indications are that Cherepanov was engaging in a chemical version of one of the oldest doping tricks in the book, blood doping.

In blood doping, originally, athletes would have some blood removed, just as if they were donating at the local Red Cross. That blood is saved and after the body has re-filled by creating more blood, it’s re-injected, giving a temporary boost of red blood cells, increasing VO2 max, the oxygen carrying capacity of the body. It’s a similar effect to training at altitude. In the late eighties and nineties, some discovered that the use of genetically engineered drugs to combat anemia could be used in a similar fashion. EPO (or repo, or epogen) became heavily abused drugs in sports like cycling, distance running, and others where stamina was key.

The downside for EPO usage - or rather overusage - is what users call “syruping” or “sludging.” If the blood has too many red blood cells, instead of being liquid and free-flowing, the blood gets too thick for the heart to pump efficiently, putting more of a load and eventually either thickening too much or the heart gives out. It’s a gruesome, painful death, as shown in the case of cycling star Marco Pantoni.

EPO is illegal in most sports and there’s never been a positive test in baseball, though it’s unclear if baseball actually tests for it. Like HGH, there’s great difficulty in differentiating between natural EPO and the recombinant version. Since baseball isn’t a big stamina sport, there’s not much reason for a player to use it, but there’s always some concern that there will be someone who thinks they can find one. I’ve always wondered if teams heading to Colorado might be more apt to try it in the way that one team used hyperbaric chambers for pitchers in a week before their Colorado starts.

There’s always something out there lurking and someone willing to inject, snort, and swallow the next drug that will help them. Sadly, that means that there will be another Alexei Cherepanov somewhere down the line.

Originally posted by Will Carroll from Baseball Prospectus: Unfiltered, on December 30, 2008 12:37 PM

This kid is 16-years-old: "I would have to call to make the reservation at Per Se at exactly 10 A.M today if I had any hope of getting that Saturday reservation. The only problem? I had school. I sat patiently in my 9:30 – 10:25 science class as the clock neared 10. Very strategically, at exactly 9:57, I innocently asked to use the bathroom. I walked, no sprinted to the bathroom down the hall. I scrolled down my contact list until I reached Per Se, then dialed, and waited… After three minutes of waiting, a janitor came in. I cowered against the wall, praying he wouldn’t take my phone. “Is it an important call?” “Oh my god yes” I genuinely responded. [Foodie at Fifteen via Kottke]

Originally posted by BL from Eater, on December 30, 2008 10:51 AM

A fifteen-year old foodie used some of the money from his summer job to go dine solo at Per Se. In an attempt to secure the hard-to-get reservation, he asked to be excused from his classroom and dialed the reservations line while hiding in the bathroom.

It was September 29th; exactly two months from the Saturday of Thanksgiving break and one of the few times I would be able to make the trek up to New York to dine at Per Se. I would have to call to make the reservation at Per Se at exactly 10 A.M today if I had any hope of getting that Saturday reservation. The only problem? I had school.

I sat patiently in my 9:30 - 10:25 science class as the clock neared 10. Very strategically, at exactly 9:57, I innocently asked to use the bathroom. I walked, no sprinted to the bathroom down the hall. I scrolled down my contact list until I reached Per Se, then dialed, and waited...

(link)

Originally posted by jason@kottke.org from kottke.org, on December 30, 2008 10:35 AM

Another memorable press conference in Chicago. Rod Blagojevich announced he was appointing a beaming Roland Burris to Obama's vacant Senate seat, and Rep. Bobby Rush (D-IL) made a cameo appearance heavily laced with references to race.

Video soon.

Originally posted by David Kurtz from Talking Points Memo, on December 30, 2008 10:30 AM

Rod Blagojevich and Roland Burris just held their press conference to announce the attempted appointment of Burris to the Senate -- and it was a train wreck if there ever was one.

Blagojevich forcefully said that the people of Illinois should not be without full representation in the Senate, and urged people to not hold any cloud over Burris: "Please don't allow the allegations against me to taint this good and honest man."

Burris had an awkward moment when he was asked about his past donations to Blagojevich's campaign. Burris expressed surprise at the dollar amount listed. "We didn't have that much money to give to the governor," he said in a jocular tone -- not exactly the sort of remark that would inspire confidence.

Burris also backed away sharply from his prior statements that he was only seeking to be a caretaker. When asked whether he would run in 2010, Burris responded: "We have to determine that when we get to that point."

Finally, Rep. Bobby Rush (D-IL) made an appearance at the podium and stated in forceful terms that the Senate must not reject the appointment of a black Senator, going so far as to tell everyone to not "hang or lynch the appointee as you try to ruin and castigate the appointer."

Wow.

Originally posted by Eric Kleefeld from TPM Election Central, on December 30, 2008 10:21 AM

Gizmodo’s Jesus Diaz reports “Steve Jobs’s Health Declining Rapidly, Reason for Macworld Cancellation”. CNBC’s Jim Goldman retorts that Jobs is fine, citing “sources inside Apple”. Goldman:

I was told two weeks ago by sources inside Apple that the decision had nothing to do with Jobs’ health. I got the same message today. Period.

I will say again: if Apple is lying, holding some truth back, manipulating its own stock by manipulating the truth, someone — indeed a lot of people — could be going to jail. Do I like the way Apple has handled this ongoing story? No. But do I traffic in rumors to fill the void the company has created by not choosing to be more forthcoming about Jobs’s health? Absolutely not.

I’d believe CNBC over Gizmodo anyway, but the quoted passage Gizmodo includes from their “source” reads like a speculative forum posting from an illiterate.

 ★ 

Originally posted by John Gruber from Daring Fireball, on December 30, 2008 10:18 AM

Spent a couple hours last night writing the core of a stripped down, PHP4 compatible API library for Amazon SimpleDB (in the style of my flickr simple library. Just not a fan of abstraction for its own sake). In the process I discovered that Amazon had revved the version on their “Signature Method”. Which is good news as SignatureVersion 1 contains a classic crypto-blunder in its design, namely it encourages collisions. (more details) To date the solution was use SSL, and wait patiently, very patiently. So yay for Amazon fixing this! And in fairness, first couple of drafts of the OAuth spec contained a similar issue, though it got ironed out quickly. Yay for many eyes and the open web.

“OAuth-compatible” signing

Great things are more secure, good news and all, but that isn’t what caught my eye. This block of text did:

Here is what’s different about forming the string to sign for signature version 2:

• You include additional components of the request in the string to sign
• You include the query string control parameters (the equals signs and ampersands) in the string to sign
• You sort the query string parameters using byte ordering
• You URL encode the query string parameters and their values before signing the request

You really have to be an OAuth-dork to find anything special with that paragraph, but if you were, you’d notice that those 4 bullets are an incredibly succinct description of generating an OAuth signature. (in fact a more succinct description then appears anywhere in the OAuth documentation

Which meant that my SimpleDB library can reuse most of the logic from my OAuth library to do the trickiest part of the API call, namely the signing. (Additionally it means that security reviews of both protocols support each other)

So my AWS signing method is a approximately a dozen characters different then my OAuth method and as straightforward as:

    .....

    $signature = aws_request_signature(AWS_SECRET_KEY, $http_method, AWS_SIMPLEDB_SERVICEURL, $parameters);
    $parameters['Signature'] = $signature;

    $encoded_params = array();

    foreach ($parameters as $k => $v){
        $encoded_params[] = oauth_urlencodeRFC3986($k).'='.oauth_urlencodeRFC3986($v);
    }

    $request_url = AWS_SIMPLEDB_SERVICEURL . '?' . implode('&', $encoded_params);

    .....

    function aws_request_signature($key, $http_method, $service_url, $parameters) {
        $base_string = aws_base_string($http_method, $service_url, $parameters);
        return base64_encode(hash_hmac('sha1', $base_string, $key, true));
    }

    function aws_base_string($http_method, $service_url, $parameters) {
        $parsed = parse_url($service_url);

        $host = strtolower($parsed['host']);
        $path = $parsed['path'] ? $parsed['path'] : '/';
        $data = array(
            strtoupper($http_method),
            $host,
            $path,
            oauth_normalized_request_params($parameters)
        );

        $base_string = join("\n", $data);
        return $base_string;
    }

(this uses my personal OAuth library, but your library should have similar methods)

Sure made my jobs of implementing a library easier. If you’re going to invent a new crypto protocol, please consider doing like Amazon, and re-using the basic building blocks. (which also happen to be best practices)

Originally posted by Kellan from Laughing Meme, on December 30, 2008 10:10 AM

You’ve heard lots and lots about Mark Teixeira over the last few weeks. Here’s something you hadn’t heard before. Teixeira has the most career homers through his first 6 seasons for a guy to play for at least 3 teams during that period. It’s exceptionally rare for someone with his level of production to change teams so often before reaching free agency for the first time.

  Cnt Player             **HR**  Tms From  To   Ages   G    PA    AB    R    H   2B  3B  RBI  BB  IBB  SO  HBP  SH  SF GDP  SB   CS   BA   OBP   SLG   OPS  Positions Teams
+----+-----------------+-------+----+----+----+-----+----+-----+-----+----+----+---+---+----+----+---+----+---+---+---+---+----+---+-----+-----+-----+-----+---------+-----------+
    1 Mark Teixeira       203      3 2003 2008 23-28  904  3931  3414  566  989 223  13  676  442  60  694  53   0  22  79   13   3  .290  .378  .541  .919 *3/D957   TEX-ATL-LAA
    2 Roger Maris         191      3 1957 1962 22-27  842  3522  3053  539  793 117  28  557  414  28  427  22   7  26  41   17   9  .260  .350  .504  .854 *98/7     CLE-KCA-NYY
    3 Jason Bay           149      3 2003 2008 24-29  771  3259  2782  476  785 164  20  491  397  27  734  38   5  37  51   53  11  .282  .375  .516  .891 *7/8D9    SDP-PIT-BOS
    4 Preston Wilson      140      3 1998 2003 23-28  751  3033  2716  412  724 153  12  472  255  10  750  37   4  21  80  102  45  .267  .335  .486  .821 *8/79     NYM-FLA-COL
    5 Kevin Mitchell      135      3 1984 1990 22-28  688  2688  2378  369  661 125  19  412  274  52  439  13   2  21  39   24  26  .278  .353  .517  .870 *75/9683  NYM-SFG-SDP
    6 Jason Thompson      130      3 1976 1981 21-26  803  3206  2739  374  718 109  10  466  427  30  484   4   5  31  67    6   6  .262  .359  .452  .811 *3/D      DET-CAL-PIT
    7 Tony Batista        125      4 1996 2001 22-27  700  2644  2437  349  634 125  13  385  156   7  462  22   6  23  53   24  12  .260  .308  .476  .784 56/4D     OAK-ARI-TOR-BAL
    8 Dolph Camilli       122      3 1933 1938 26-31  734  3142  2672  478  759 130  40  459  447   0  485  12  11   0  35   33   0  .284  .389  .500  .889 *3        CHC-PHI-BRO
    9 Cory Snyder         118      3 1986 1991 23-28  728  2772  2597  312  624 117  10  357  142  16  702   6   6  21  51   19  14  .240  .279  .429  .708 *9/6735D8 CLE-TOR-CHW
   10 Jimmie Hall         116      3 1963 1968 25-30  801  2814  2523  355  656  88  19  359  259  31  461   2  12  18  53   29  15  .260  .327  .448  .775 *879      MIN-CAL-CLE
   11 Leon Wagner         113      3 1958 1963 24-29  642  2317  2063  306  571  66  11  344  207  26  300  20   7  20  21   18  14  .277  .345  .484  .829 *7/9      SFG-STL-LAA
   12 Zeke Bonura         112      3 1934 1939 25-30  789  3481  3089  539  966 202  26  639  354   0  163  16  22   0  22   16   7  .313  .386  .504  .890 *3        CHW-WSH-NYG
   13 Paul Konerko        111      3 1997 2002 21-26  673  2677  2413  349  692 131   5  410  207   8  343  33   1  23  86    3   1  .287  .348  .483  .831 *3/D57    LAD-CIN-CHW
   14 Jermaine Dye        110      3 1996 2001 22-27  706  2846  2577  376  735 151  12  425  220  18  494  16   2  31  62   16  12  .285  .341  .481  .822 *9/7D8    ATL-KCR-OAK
   15 Jeff Kent           107      4 1992 1997 24-29  757  2981  2705  386  728 156  13  439  188  15  548  48   9  31  54   27  21  .269  .324  .455  .779 *45/3D6   NYM-TOR-NYM-CLE-SFG
   16 Wally Westlake      107      4 1947 1952 26-31  762  2904  2611  394  705  89  30  450  246   0  374  29  18   0  82   17   6  .270  .340  .450  .790 98/75     PIT-STL-CIN-CLE
   17 Shea Hillenbrand    104      4 2001 2006 25-30  870  3538  3303  438  947 197  13  459  133  17  434  68   1  33 113   16   9  .287  .325  .449  .774 *53/D     BOS-ARI-TOR-SFG
   18 Curt Blefary        103      3 1965 1970 21-26  821  3199  2697  364  645  96  20  358  419  42  405  28  32  23  39   24  23  .239  .345  .404  .749 739/2     BAL-HOU-NYY
   19 Lee Thomas          103      5 1961 1966 25-30  860  3297  2932  375  766 103  21  394  303  26  353  28  18  16  76   22  10  .261  .335  .416  .751 39/78     NYY-LAA-BOS-CHC-ATL
   20 Dale Long           101      3 1951 1959 25-33  705  2554  2248  292  610 100  28  361  265  32  372   5   7  29  56    4   2  .271  .346  .476  .822 *3/27     PIT-SLB-PIT-CHC
   21 Andre Thornton      100      3 1973 1978 23-28  616  2332  1919  316  494  93  19  321  354  22  322  30   8  21  40   16  15  .257  .378  .482  .860 *3/9D5    CHC-MON-CLE
   22 Woodie Held         100      3 1954 1961 22-29  609  2287  2015  269  499  77  13  299  223  18  448  19  14  16  46    6   6  .248  .326  .448  .774 *68/574   NYY-KCA-CLE
   23 Sammy Sosa           95      3 1989 1994 20-25  658  2510  2317  330  587  93  24  304  140  16  585  20  17  16  46  125  58  .253  .300  .437  .737 *98/7D    TEX-CHW-CHC
   24 Ken Harrelson        95      3 1963 1968 21-26  672  2460  2176  262  535  77  10  314  253  24  450   4  11  16  71   35  21  .246  .323  .421  .744 *39/7     KCA-WSA-KCA-BOS
   25 Brad Fullmer         94      3 1997 2002 22-27  668  2540  2325  322  655 175  13  374  163  28  312  32   0  20  60   26  15  .282  .335  .489  .824 *D3/7     MON-TOR-ANA

Originally posted by Andy from Stat of the Day, on December 30, 2008 9:49 AM

as Chris points out, it's still unofficial and URLs may change  

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Waxy.org Links, on December 30, 2008 9:25 AM

Just a typical day at work.

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Marco.org, on December 30, 2008 9:13 AM

I had a moment of weakness this morning. There was a blaster of Stadium Club that I bought a few weeks ago squirreled away in the trunk of my car that was being saved to do another live rip face off against Hand Collated. After ripping and posting the blaster I got this weekend though, I got it out of the car and opened that sucka. I wasn't planning to post this, but I think it's worthy of examination.

80 Ryan Braun
82 Manny Ramirez
56 Garrett Atkins
119 Jed Lowrie RC
51 Ichiro 1st Day

1 Chase Utley
85 Matt Holliday
50 David Wright
53 Josh Hamilton
93 Ty Cobb 1st Day
WTFRC?

133 Chin-Lung Hu RC
125 Josh Banks RC
13 Alex Rodriguez
109 Garrett Mock RC
48 John Lackey 1st Day

23 Tom Glavine
142 Greg Smith RC
74 Rich Harden
38 Hunter Pence
99 Ted Williams 1st Day

41 Adrian Gonzalez
143 Nick Blackburn RC
62 Joba Chamberlain
92 Mickey Mantle
36 Troy Tulowitzki

43 Felix Hernandez
34 Brian Roberts
136 Jay Bruce RC
5 Russ Martin
135 Jeff Niemann RC 1st Day

57 Joe Mauer
28 Ryan Church
35 Ken Griffey Jr
64 Victor Martinez
126 Mitch Boggs RC 1st Day

16 Jake Peavy
145 Clay Buchholz
44 Magglio Ordonez
100 Tom Seaver
147 Radhames Liz RC 1st Day

Notice anything? Any similarities? Here, let me help you out. Here are the contents of the two blasters put together and sorted by numerical order. I have colored box 1's contents red and box 2's contents green to add some Christmassy flavor:

1 Chase Utley
1 Chase Utley
5 Russ Martin
5 Russ Martin
6 Curtis Granderson 1st Day
9 Alfonso Soriano 1st Day
13 Alex Rodriguez 13 Alex Rodriguez
14 Prince Fielder
15 Alex Gordon 1st Day
16 Jake Peavy
16 Jake Peavy
23 Tom Glavine
23 Tom Glavine
28 Ryan Church
28 Ryan Church
34 Brian Roberts
34 Brian Roberts
35 Ken Griffey Jr
35 Ken Griffey Jr
36 Troy Tulowitzki
38 Hunter Pence
38 Hunter Pence
41 Adrian Gonzalez
41 Adrian Gonzalez
43 Felix Hernandez
43 Felix Hernandez
44 Magglio Ordonez
48 John Lackey 1st Day
50 David Wright
50 David Wright
51 Ichiro 1st Day
53 Josh Hamilton
53 Josh Hamilton
56 Garrett Atkins
56 Garrett Atkins
57 Joe Mauer
57 Joe Mauer
62 Joba Chamberlain
62 Joba Chamberlain
64 Victor Martinez
64 Victor Martinez
74 Rich Harden
74 Rich Harden
80 Ryan Braun
80 Ryan Braun
82 Manny Ramirez
82 Manny Ramirez
85 Matt Holliday
85 Matt Holliday
87 Jimmy Rollins 1st Day
88 Hideki Matsui
92 Mickey Mantle
92 Mickey Mantle
93 Ty Cobb 1st Day
99 Ted Williams 1st Day
100 Tom Seaver
109 Garrett Mock RC
109 Garrett Mock RC
119 Jed Lowrie RC
119 Jed Lowrie RC
125 Josh Banks RC
125 Josh Banks RC
126 Mitch Boggs RC 1st Day
129 Elliot Johnson RC 1st Day
130 Brian Barton RC 1st Day
131 Sean Rodriguez RC
133 Chin-Lung Hu RC
133 Chin-Lung Hu RC
135 Jeff Niemann RC 1st Day
136 Jay Bruce RC
136 Jay Bruce RC
141 Mike Aviles RC 1st Day
142 Greg Smith RC
142 Greg Smith RC
143 Nick Blackburn RC
143 Nick Blackburn RC
144 Justin Ruggiano RC 1st Day
145 Clay Buchholz
147 Radhames Liz RC 1st Day

So, um... Yeah. Looks like a candy cane. I think this can be accurately described as a blaster disaster. To that guy who stated he needed a lot of cards out of that first box? E-mail me dude... Albuqwirke gets first dibs though, as this isn't the last Stadium Club post for today.

Originally posted by dayf from Cardboard Junkie, on December 30, 2008 8:16 AM

In a letter to the editor from Janice Blake of Milton, Massachusetts printed in the December 2008 issue of Gourmet magazine, a belated appreciation of David Foster Wallace's 2004 piece, Consider the Lobster.

I began subscribing to Gourmet in 1973, but I have to admit that over the years, I haven't been able to read each issue from cover to cover. I'm just now getting around to reading August 2004's issue. "Consider the Lobster," by David Foster Wallace, was a delight -- it went well beyond informative and entertaining; it was challenging and thought-provoking. I vividly remember the spate of letters that followed its publication. In fact, I was so impressed with his article that I recently decided to write to say thank you both to the author and to you. What a shock it was to find out that he had tragically passed away. Thank you, Gourmet, for being so willing to change and grow over the years, and for challenging all of us faitful readers to do the same.

Originally posted by jason@kottke.org from kottke.org, on December 30, 2008 8:12 AM

I said below that the Senate had full power to seat or not to seat any Blago appointee. And the senate does have extensive power to judge elections and qualifications. But Jeff Greenfield points out that the senate may not actually have that power with regards to an appointment ...

Hey, Josh--re the Senate's power.

I think you're wrong about saying the Senate has full power not to seat the Gov's pick. In Powell vs McCormick, a 1969 case involving Adam Clayton Powell, the Supreme Court said, 7-2, that a house of Congress does NOT have such power-they can judge "qualifications" in the Constitutional sense (age, citizenship, etc). And they can judge elections, but say nothing about appointments. (Nate Silver did a great piece on this awhile back).

They can probably EXPEL a member as they see fit--though the Court's decision does not make that clear---but on what grounds? Just because they don't like the guy who picked him?

PS--just know these are tentative notions...I'm sure all sorts of folks are trying to tease out this one...(don't know if every Senate official and/or academic is on vacation this week)

Originally posted by Josh Marshall from Talking Points Memo, on December 30, 2008 8:04 AM

an incredibly well-researched list, with related recommendations for every entry  

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Waxy.org Links, on December 30, 2008 7:45 AM

We've just gotten word that Gov. Blagojevich has decided to appoint Roland Burris to Obama's senate seat.

I've heard the name before. But I don't know much more than that. So we're trying to get a better read on his background and just who he is. But on the face of it, he's a respected black politician from Illinois, (a former state AG (1991-1995)), who's a generation older than Obama. He's 71.

The idea has been that the senate simply wouldn't seat anyone appointed by Blagojevich, as is their right. The senate has total authority over who it chooses to seat in the body. But assuming Burris is respected and there's no apparent crooked bargain behind the appointment, I think the senate may be hard pressed not to seat him, notwithstanding all that's happened.

One question David poses, is why, if Burris is clean, he would accept an appointment from such a tainted governor. Not sure I have a good answer to that one.

As TPM Reader RP puts it, this guy won't go down quietly.

Late Update: TPM Reader PD chimes in on Burris ...

My home state's culture of political corruption is well documented. Roland Burris managed to build a career in politics in this state without falling into that muck. He is, to the best of everyone's knowledge, squeaky clean, and he's highly respected. He's 71 years old, so I wonder if he intends to serve as a caretaker. But he's an honorable guy, well liked by people across the state in both parties. It's a stroke of brilliance by Blagojevich in my opinion.

Originally posted by Josh Marshall from Talking Points Memo, on December 30, 2008 7:27 AM

Filed under: Software, Beta Beat, Developer

Espresso, the highly-anticipated web design and development platform from MacRabbit (creators of CSSEdit), has been released as a public beta (originally predicted for late November). It's not finished (that's why it's called beta, silly), but it's far more complete than what we've seen thus far. The auto-completion capabilities of the editor are well-developed, support for HTML, XML, CSS and Javascript is included, and the live preview is working nicely. The array of available Sugars, as the extension packages are called, is frequently being added to by users, and support for additional languages is already available. A few themes, some ported from TextMate, can also be found on the wiki.

Web developers who have used CSSEdit are familiar with the simple interface which belies many powerful features. You can expect the same from Espresso. Coda users will be interested as well; when Espresso is feature-complete, you can expect a TUAW-style head-to-head comparison of the two. Personally, I'm a die-hard TextMate user, which any of the TUAW crew can attest to. I always have trouble getting into new editors, no matter how rich their feature set may be. I stopped editing CSS in TextMate when CSSEdit came out, though; there's just no comparison. Knowing CSSEdit the way I do, Espresso may be the platform which finally pulls some of my TextMate loyalty away ... at least for web design.

You can grab the time-limited (30 days) beta from MacRabbit's site. If you're a developer, make sure you check out the wiki. For me, the most appealing aspect of Espresso is its extensibility, and a look through the SDK should pique the interest of any code-sligner.

TUAWBeta Beat: MacRabbit's Espresso released as public beta originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Tue, 30 Dec 2008 12:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

Originally posted by Brett Terpstra from The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW), on December 30, 2008 7:00 AM

Do high-priced optics really make much difference in a pair of binoculars? Yes. Great optics create a very bright image within a large viewing area, so that if feels as if you are looking through a magic window rather than squinting through a tiny peephole. Your eyes scan the scope easily, as if there were no glass in front of them -- except everything is closer. You can watch longer, in dimmer light, without fatigue, which is what you want for birding, sporting, or boating. If great optics are squeezed into a lightweight waterproof small object you can hold this magic window longer without the shakes. In short, superior optics make distance viewing clearer, easier, weather tolerant and all around better. According to the Cornell Ornithology Lab and Birder's World, the best buy for high-quality optics birding binoculars are the Nikon Monarchs. The go for about $216 on the street.

These are startlingly bright, wide-eyed, and lightweight (21.5 oz), which has made the Monarchs a best seller. Because they are waterproof and shockproof -- with an amazing 25-year warranty -- they are also very popular with hunters. They can also focus as close as 8 feet -- ideal for dragonfly and butterfly viewing (thus the name Monarch).

If you have not examined binoculars recently they are undergoing a performance curve similar to cameras, getting better and cheaper each year. These $250 binocs would have cost $1,000 only 5 years ago. When friends view these Nikon Monarchs, they go "Wow! It's like a movie screen!" I've found the ease of viewing -- sort of like watching a flat screen rather than peering through a tube -- encourages me to use them more. I also like the fact they are waterproof so I can use them in the rain and mist without worry. I wear prescription sunglasses and these work perfectly fine with them. They also feel well-balanced in my medium hands. I find I can hold them fairly steady for long periods of time with one hand. None of this was true with my inexpensive binoculars in the past.

The very best binoculars today go for $2,000. But for only $216 (what I paid ), or one tenth the price, you can get a pair of these Nikon Monarch binoculars and get 95% of the same performance. Sure, in a one-to-one comparison, a pair of $2,000 binoculars may be a little better, but they are not 10 times better.

Other new models share many of the same features of these 8x42 Monarchs, including sealed optics, waterproofing, coated glass, and bright viewing, but these others cost a minimum of $500-600. There are certainly cheaper binocs (you can get decent ones for $50) but they suffer from dim views, narrow fields, short lives. The Nikon Monarchs make a fantastic tool: You get most of a thousand-dollar view for a bargain price.

-- KK

$216-$250 (price seems to vary on demand)
Available from Amazon

Manufactured by Nikon

Related Entries:
Eagle Optics Pancro Lens Cleaning Fluid Trail Cameras

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Cool Tools, on December 30, 2008 6:55 AM

The Mets have announced that partial season ticket plans for the 2009 season will be available to the general public on January 6th at 10 a.m.

Packages include 40-game and 15-game ticket plans.

For more info go to Mets.com.

Originally posted by Regis Courtemanche from MetsBlog.com, on December 30, 2008 6:54 AM

It's now official that Al Franken is ahead in the Minnesota recount by 50 votes, after the state canvassing board finally approved a spreadsheet of all the ballots that have been counted, recounted and examined again over this very long process. And while it now appears to be almost certain that Franken will defeat GOP Sen. Norm Coleman in the end, it's hardly over.

The board did some last-minute reviews and corrections this morning, sorting out complaints from both campaigns of clerical errors in the allocations of some of the challenged ballots. And so Al Franken, who entered the recount down by 215 votes, is currently ahead by a margin of 0.00171% out of over 2.9 million votes.

Now we get into a very messy stage in this process: Getting the two campaigns to agree on which rejected absentee ballots were wrongly thrown out and ought to be put into the pool, under the state Supreme Court's ruling that has given the campaigns effective veto power over whether any new individual votes are to be counted even when local officials say they were wrongly thrown out.

So far the campaigns have not agreed to anything, with the Coleman campaign appearing to be the more belligerent player -- an outcome that could easily be predicted after the court handed down its opinion. The campaigns do face threatened sanctions for bad-faith behavior, but it remains to be seen if any new ballots at all will be counted.

Late Update: Al Franken has released this statement:

"Today, the state canvassing board completed an important step in this process. I'm glad to be ahead, and as it appears that we're on track to win, I want Minnesotans to know that I'm ready to get to work for them in Washington on Day One. We still need to ensure that Minnesotans whose absentee ballots were improperly rejected aren't disenfranchised, but we are close to the finish line. And we should all be proud of our state's electoral process, and grateful for the dedication of our public servants, from the state canvassing board down to elections officials at the local level."

Meanwhile, the Coleman campaign is attacking the state election officials, saying that they're in the tank for Franken.

Originally posted by Eric Kleefeld from TPM Election Central, on December 30, 2008 5:53 AM

This documentary was truly enjoyable. It follows Sirio Maccioni's restaurant Le Cirque from its heyday in the Palace Hotel decades ago when it was populated by people like Ronald Reagan and Joan Collins, to its close, then it's reopening in the Bloomberg building just a few years ago. Of course no story is complete without conflict and it doesn't get any better than conflict between an old Italian patriarch and his Italian-American sons who are either constantly being berated by their father or who try desperately to convince their father that things aren't as they once were; the arguments over whether the new Le Cirque should have a jacket and tie dress code get heated and are very entertaining and touching. My only criticism of the film is that it was too short. There were incidents such as the firing of the chef after only receiving two stars by the New York Times shortly after its reopening that were glossed over; I would have loved to see more of that hairy process. Towards the end I could sense the film was winding down and I got sad because I wanted more. Nevertheless, it is definitely worth seeing - it aired on HBO last night but I'm sure it'll air again so get to your DVR/Teevo now!

Click here for the trailer! It's worth waiting for the annoying ad to pass.

* Thanks to HBO for a screener of this great doc I was happy to review!

Originally posted by Andrea from Andrea Harner, on December 30, 2008 5:48 AM

Originally posted by (author unknown) from the real janelle, on December 30, 2008 5:07 AM

Shared by Bud
A great list of resources for javascript and jQuery development.

I have been using JavaScript since version 1.1, and learning the language has been a rewarding experience. It probably would have been a more frustrating ordeal

Originally posted by (author unknown) from blog.reindel.com, on December 30, 2008 4:40 AM

I found several of these in my grandparents' home which was previously the home of the late artist Florence E. Ware [1891-1971]. These were her holiday cards in 1967. Each is a 3 x 5 Kodacolor print of one of her paintings with Futura type super-imposed on the print. *Check-out the peace pipe.

Originally posted by Abby from HI + LOW, on December 30, 2008 3:38 AM

"I haven't done anything, but who knows. [Her husband] Andrew [Upton] said he'd divorce me if I did anything. I'm not a spokesperson against the world of injectables. If you grow up in an environment where your mother gets you a boob job when you turn 18, what hope is there? But I didn't grow up in that world. If you're doing it out of fear, that fear's still going to be seen through your eyes. The windows to your soul, they say."

-- Cate Blanchett, to Vanity Fair, on her feelings towards plastic surgery

Originally posted by Tracy Pepey from iVillage - Daily Blabber, on December 30, 2008 3:02 AM

Instead of futilely trying to sleep last night, I sat down and tried out an idea in Rakudo. Just a quick throwaway script, comprising a couple of arrays and a few for loops.

Now, I know that as soon as you expand your repertoire into something new, you run into bugs in Rakudo. But this time I ran into 7 bugs in the course of an hour. That surprised even me.

Actually, of those 7 "bugs", one was a TODO feature request, and one was a general question about syntax... but still, 5 bugs in an hour is a lot. This tells me three things:

1. A lot has happened in Rakudo lately. And the last thing I want is for this to come through as a critique of the Rakudo development process, of which I'm constantly impressed. But the fact that I ran into those bugs tells me that I'm one of the very first people to actually try those features.
2. Tests are great, but they're no substitute for real programs. Rakudo has a lot of tests, and all of them pass most of the time. But actual programs tend to shake out slightly different kinds of bugs, it turns out. Even if the "actual program" happens to be a toy problem thrown together at one o'clock in the night, as in my case.
3. We need more people who love to throw together scripts in Perl 6. And who are eager to try them out in Rakudo, and who care enough when things break to report bugs to rakudobug@perl.org. I know you're out there.

Rakudo has evolved at an amazing rate the last few months. You're likely to find Perl 6 features you've heard about already implemented in Rakudo, and most of the time, they work as specced! Did I mention that it feels great to be writing code in Perl 6, and then typing perl6 code-in-perl6 on the command line, and seeing it run?

We need more people who think it's great to write and run Perl 6 programs. With more eyeballs and hands, more bugs will be unearthed sooner, and Rakudo will be a stable, production-usable product sooner.

If you want to get involved, check out eric256's Perl 6 examples repository, and think of something you'd like to add to that. Or take pmichaud's challenge. Or just come visit at #perl6 @ irc.freenode.net and try some quick Perl 6 one-liners on the eval bot hanging around, discussing the finer points of syntax with the regulars. Or just scratch a scripting itch of your own.

Whatever you do, there's a small chance you might turn up what appears to be a bug. If you do, and if you submit that bug to rakudobug@perl.org, you're a hero, because you've made Rakudo Perl 6 a little bit more stable.

I'm sure there's lots of that type of heroes out there, just waiting for some cool new piece of software to try. Try Rakudo.

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Planet Perl Six, on December 30, 2008 12:22 AM

Did you know that Oakland Crimespotting is still kicking hard, with hundreds of alert subscribers and a smooth, regular flow of timely data from the Oakland Police Department? The project has essentially been on auto-pilot since we re-launched it back in March, but holiday side projects have been a favorite activity of mine for years, so this time I'm thinking about the relatively short time horizon Crimespotting offers.

The current interface offers up to a month's worth of highly granular information on individual reports, and you can quickly get a sense for how active a given neighborhood is by digging around a little, doing a few searches, and checking out details on local crime reports. What we don't have is a long view.

Heat maps are one effective way to present large volumes of aggregate data over a geographical area, so I've been exploring ways to make them legible for crime data.

There's a ton of existing work out there in this area to draw on, some of it good and some of it dreadful.

First and foremost is Martin Watternberg's seminal Map Of The Market, a live and non-geographical view of stock trading activity, that celebrated its ten-year anniversary this past year. MOTM shows volume and change over time in a tight, clean, effective package most recently notable for showing how Campbell's Soup and gold mining managed to weather the recent precipitous drops in the Dow.

A more topical geographic example is Microsoft Research project How We Watch the City: Popularity and Online Maps. Danyel Fisher used server logs from Microsoft Virtual Earth tile servers to show viewing patterns around the world, with the beautiful results shown here.

Finally, HeatMapAPI offers commercial support for making your own heat maps.

The results of HeatMapAPI's software actually illustrate a few of the things I've found weakest about geographic heat maps, a big excuse for why we've not done them for Oakland Crimespotting so far. There are two big shortfalls in the screen shot above: the data obscures the context, and simultaneously fails to communicate much in the way of specifics. The two primary questions you might want to ask of your data are "where?" and "how much?" The answers offered here are apparently "in a place near Whittier whose name I can't read" and "yellow".

So that's the starting point.

The answer I've settled on for the "where?" question is OpenStreetMap. I've been growing steadily more excited about this project for some months now, in part because it offers up the possibility of playing some beautiful visual games with high quality street data. In the HeatMapAPI example above, the context problem arises from the impossibility of manipulating Google's map data at any level more granular than their pre-rendered tiles. The overlays obscure the town and street names that help give them meaning. With OSM data and Mapnik, it's possible to create a semi-transparent streets layer specifically designed to interact well with underlaid data. It took just an afternoon's worth of modifications to my existing OSM visual design to come up with something suitable for layering with quantitative data.

In these maps, streets have been stripped back to translucent dark stripes, with white edges showing where the shoreline of the Bay begins.

The second question, "how much?", is somewhat more interesting. The difficulty with continuous, analog data lies in communicating something of relevance and urgency in it. If the map is orange, what does that mean exactly? Will my car get broken into?

One approach I've been prodding at takes advantage of a neighborhood sense for time and space. People know how big a city block is, how it feels for a month to go by. We know something of this in our database of crime reports too, so the colors in these experimental designs are keyed to specific meanings. Orange here denotes areas where, on average, the police respond to a call once per month for every 100m x 100m city block. Inside orange, there are two more divisions shown as brighter, hotter colors: two weeks and one week. For the police to show up right on your block every week is quite heavy, and there are just a few places in town that see this kind of activity. Outside orange, there are divisions of green that represent an additional month of peace and quiet for every block at each step.

At this level, you can start to see where OpenStreetMap data really begins to shine: all those little flag icons represent Oakland public schools that I added to the OSM database specifically to have such local data available to Crimespotting. The Microsoft Virtual Earth maps we use on the current site are beautiful, but they aren't particularly helpful in the way of local, civic data relevant to a consideration of police activity.

As the map zooms in closer, large amorphous blobs particulate into smaller, more granular bleeps and bloops. When you start seeing individual blocks in the map, you can also see individual corner hot spots. Here, the two downtown Oakland BART stations, a slice of MLK between 14th and 16th streets, and the area immediately around Oakland Police headquarters on Broadway and 7th are especially hot. The colors at every zoom level continue to mean the same things: always orange for "once a month, once per block". The colors here are cribbed from Cynthia Brewer's cpt-city work, a combination of YlGn and Oranges.

I'm happy that Lincoln Elementary School seems to sit in a safe zone of relatively low crime.

At a certain point, increased granularity becomes a problem. Our data is really only accurate to the city block level, so it doesn't make sense to generate a heat map more specific than this. The smooth, swooping whorls at the highest levels of zoom help to communicate the relative imprecision of the data at this level.

Overall, I'm happy with the results so far. These images are being generated through a combination of GDAL, Mapnik, NumPy and PIL. They're not yet ready to be integrated into the Crimespotting site proper, though I imagine that the first place they would eventually show up would be on the static map beat pages. I'm interested in comments or criticisms on how to improve the beauty or clarity of these results, before they're pushed in the direction of a proper release.

Comments (1)

Originally posted by (author unknown) from tecznotes, on December 29, 2008 11:54 PM

I think I have this right. The Republican party has decided on the racial joke issue as the vehicle to reintroduce themselves to the American people after the 2008 blow out.

Am I missing something?

Originally posted by Josh Marshall from Talking Points Memo, on December 29, 2008 2:14 PM

In a blog post that I wrote for work today, I had occasion to use an interrobang as part of a title. Hooray! A chance to exercise some pointless effort in pursuit of typographical correctness.

But chasing down that obscure character led me to thinking about an opportunity that still exists for all the type designers out there. Does any commercially-available font out there do a good job of anticipating modern uses of text like smileys and texting shortcuts, and create styled characters or ligatures for them?

We will increasingly see marks like :) and "B4" and "OMG" showing up in print or in styled text online, and that means we should have appropriate typography to represent these words and phrases as our language evolves. This, of course, would also require a Unicode character representation to be added for common smilies, just as one was added for the Euro symbol when that currency was introduced.

The Euro mark also offers us an opportunity to avoid a mistake made when that symbol was introduced. The familiar € mark was unfortunately introduced more as a logo than as a character, meaning designers were initially discouraged from tailoring the presentation of the symbol for appopriate display in the context of a particular font.

With smileys, and especially with new text ligatures from characters that would never have been paired up in the past, we have the chance to see font designers interpret these new parts of the language in the context of type designs that may have existed in some form for centuries. That promises to be fascinating!

Of course, I'm far from an expert about type, let alone about design in general, so maybe someone's already doing good work in this realm, and it's just escaped my notice. Either way, I look forward to finding out when I'll be able to use typographically elegant OMGs and ;)s on my blog.

Originally posted by Anil from Anil Dash, on December 29, 2008 1:31 PM

A (very) short list of my favorite mac applications of the year...

• Dropbox - Dropbox might just be the best and most original idea of the year. File sharing and file syncronization became simple and speedy.

• Bowtie - Easily the best, simplest, and most affordable iTunes accessory ever. You can read my quick review here.

• LaunchBar 5 Beta - Years ago before Quicksilver I used LaunchBar. Well, LaunchBar has come back in a big way. Its incredibly quick and smooth. Once you try it, you won't be able to use anything else. Its that good. It just really needs a way to customize its appearance and perhaps a way to add Del.icio.us bookmarks.

• Eventbox - Eventbox is a great concept with a great design. It still needs some development, though. But its really has awesome potential.

• Flow - The fact is that Transmit by Panic is still a great and reliable Mac FTP app. No question. However Flow attempts a bit of a different thought. I have to say I was weary of switching from Transmit, but I have really grown to enjoy using Flow.

Originally posted by Liz from Lather Rinse Repeat, on December 29, 2008 12:47 PM

Highlights of yesterday's Patriots/Bills game, aka The Wind Bowl. We must have rewound that Buffalo field goal attempt at least five times...I still can't believe it hooked that much in two different directions.

(link)

Originally posted by jason@kottke.org from kottke.org, on December 29, 2008 12:32 PM

“I’m convinced. If we were to actually fight Transformers, this is how we would do it.” Lt. Col. Francisco “Paco” Hamm, the Air Force liaison to Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, as quoted in USA Today.

Originally posted by Michael Sippey from this is sippey.typepad.com, on December 29, 2008 12:23 PM

I've just returned from several weeks travel in Mexico, mostly spent at the southern end of the Baja California peninsula. It's an area with a spectacularly rich marine ecology and magnificent terrestrial flora and fauna, as well as a showcase for depressing statistics on species annihilation and corporate tourism. I'm going to post several blog entries about aspects of my trip, and the natural and social history of the Gulf of California region. Note: the Gulf of California and the Sea of Cortez are the same thing.
The main focus of the trip was five days of diving around Espiritu Santo island, just north of La Paz, and I also spent a few days camping on a beach north of Cabo Pulmo. It was a vacation, sure, and an escape from winter, and most importantly it was an astonishing immersion in the natural world, no pun intended. Scuba diving is a genuinely sublime pursuit, akin to travel to a different planet, one where you can fly and are surrounded by a tumult of wondrous agile and beautiful life forms. Some of those are skittish, and others are quite curious as to what you are and what you might be doing. Some seem to have no consciousness of you at all. It's a very different kind of experience than most excursions into "nature", much more interactive, and the diversity of life encountered during a one-hour dive is often staggering.
One of the more spectacular dives was at the El Bajo seamount, an underwater mountain that reaches to within sixty feet of the surface about 7 miles off the northeast end of Espiritu Santo. A plankton bloom had developed in the areas we'd been diving, leading to low visibility at the majority of the dive sites we'd already been to. At El Bajo, however, we descended through the green cloud of microscopic organisms and algae into a clear bell-jar of deep water, down through schools of rainbow runners to the mountaintop. Having pulled ourselves down on the anchor chain, we bobbed up slightly into a gentle current, and followed it along the ridge. I looked up to the pale haze of sunlight, and at my cloud of bubbles. I was about ten feet deeper than anyone else. I looked at my depth gauge. 105 feet. There was movement below me. I looked down.
About ten feet below my flippered feet swam a hammerhead shark.

It was going slow, flexing itself languidly, about 8 or 9 feet long. I hovered over it, drifting in the same direction. It was a deep steel gray, unscarred, it's strange head about two feet wide. I saw a flash of white from its belly as it outpaced me and faded into the gloom. We started to drift upward, back into the green cloud, depressurizing.
It was pretty great to see that hammerhead, for a couple of reasons. One, they're notoriously shy and apparently hate the sound of bubbles escaping from scuba regulators. Two, they've been drastically impacted by fishing practices over the past forty years, with a marked increase in their rate of destruction in the past decade.

The whole Sea of Cortez has seen a terrible plunge in numbers of numerous species of fish as well as sharks, rays, and turtles. Overfishing by both corporate and small-scale operations, pollution from ports, the diversion of the Colorado river (which no longer reaches the Gulf to any real extent), all of these combine to decimate populations which have historically been staggering.

(note that this table is quite old, from the mid 90's...the current situation is even more grim)
Hammerhead sharks, for example, used to school by the hundreds at El Bajo. Exactly why they did so is poorly understood, but it's obvious to anyone who wants to look that the phenomenon is not like it used to be. The spectacular displays of masses of sharks turning in hundred foot columns of ice-clear water are gone. One reason cited for this is massive small-scale gillnetting across the mouth of La Paz bay. The bay is home to a huge nursery zone for hammerheads, where they lay their eggs and where juveniles develop. Indiscriminate gillnetting has led to beaches littered with piles of severed heads, from hammerhead juveniles hauled from the nets by the score. The individual sharks are of little value, but the incredibly low cost of stretching a cheap monofilament net from a cheap fiberglass panga means that some money can be made. The unfortunate upshot of all this bootstrap entrepreneurial activity is that the sharks are being wiped out.

This is a common phenomenon in many places around the world, where cheap materials have made it possible to sieve all mobile life from a stretch of reef in a matter of hours. An additional factor is the sheer number of small panga boats being fished from in the region: tens of thousands of boats swarm both coasts of the Gulf, stretching kilometer long gillnets. Large commercial fleets are doing the majority of the eliminative work in the open ocean, using gillnets and longlines to indiscriminately snag massive takes, much of which is discarded, dead, as bycatch.
I hate the word "bycatch". It reminds me of a word used in mountaintop removal coalmining: "overburden", which is the worthless pile of everything on top of the coal seam. Bycatch is the worthless pile of everything struggling in the net alongside the things you wanted to catch. Massive death as bycatch is bringing about the end of the vaquita, the tiny Mexican harbor porpoise only found in the Northern Gulf. The vaquita is the marine cetacean closest to extinction. More about it and the terrible story of the Totoaba fishery in the next installment.

Originally posted by Roger Peet from Just Seeds: Blog, on December 29, 2008 12:18 PM

I really enjoy doing this entry every year.   have kept my goal of leaving the country at least one time each year for the past four years now.  

Park City, Utah

Salt Lake City, Utah

Los Angeles, CA

Toronto, Canada

Seattle, WA

Portland, OR

Austin, TX

Washington D.C.*

Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Union City, NJ*

One or more nights spent in each place. Those cities marked with an * were visited multiple times on non-consecutive days.  I'm not counting places in NY because I live there.  It seems silly.  Even New Jersey seems silly but it makes the list longer.

I want to go to more places that I have not been to next year.  This year, the only place that was an entirely new place was Toronto.  A goal for 09.

Originally posted by Angela Tucker from tuckergurl, on December 29, 2008 9:42 AM

A longtime reader wrote in in response to my post below saying that I was off base since Hamas doesn't recognize even the concept of the settlements -- in the sense of distinguishing between towns in Israel proper, the pre-1967 borders and those in the West Bank. But that misunderstands my point. I don't think Hamas makes that distinction. But I don't think that's the point. I thought I'd print what I wrote him in response.

I'm actually not sure how much we're disagreeing. In many ways I agree that Gaza and the West Bank have become two separate issues -- not just in terms of negotiating strategy but in terms of final outcomes. But Israel has a profound strategic interest in a viable settlement with the West Bank Palestinians. Come up with some settlement of that issue and the Gaza issue because much, much less of a big deal. But no settlement of the West Bank issue is possible with continued expansion of settlements. Indeed, I would say no settlement is possible without uprooting almost all the current West Bank settlements, with the possible exception of some in the girdle around Jerusalem. That's the core issue. And what's happening right now in Gaza does not change any of that. Of course, Hamas makes no distinction of the Green Line. That's a given. But I don't think that's the point. Israel desperately needs the West Bank issue settled. Everything that makes that more difficult endangers the state.

Originally posted by Josh Marshall from Talking Points Memo, on December 29, 2008 9:26 AM

I recently posted about the Macbook Air as a travel computer for cyclists. I also covered my effort to

… become more mobile, simplified, and lightweight. Traveling with an folding bike, S&S case brings out the perfect packer in me and a desire to get even more efficient on the road.

In this post, I’ll continue the discussion on being more mobile and the “Great Mac Sync.”

The Great Mac Sync

During the past year, I tried a travel computer set up where I had a computer at home and one for the road and tried to keep them in sync. That ultimately failed and the two computers got out of sync, not that bad, but it was just too much work keep two computers merged. With the Macbook Air, I set it up not as a duplicate machine, but a designated travel computer. I’m using it for email, blogging, and creative work on the road. I welcomed the Macbook Air to Hugga HQ by setting it up fresh and before that, I worked on the Great Mac Sync.

Local, Travel Macs

From my previous setup, I had a home computer (Local Mac) and a Travel Mac. Before I flipped on the Macbook Air and sold the Travel Mac on eBay, I wanted to get those two computers merged. I could’ve attempted that with Rysnc, a powerful unix utility, but I know like 4 terminal commands and that’s dangerous; so I opted for software

• Powertunes — merge, manage iTunes libraries
• iPhoto Library Manager — merge, manage iPhoto libraries
• Chronosync — sync document directories and more.

All three of those tools worked very well. There was some weirdness that I cleaned up with Tidy Up. I also viewed “duplicates” in iTunes and visually scanned iPhoto for duplicates and removed them.

With the Macs merged, I decommissioned the old Travel Mac and it’s since sold on eBay.

Up in the Air

Cloud computing aside, I’ve used .mac (later rebranded to MobileMe) and iDisk for years, it’s saved me more than once. Apple really knows how to sync — doing that with iPods and iPhones to iTunes.

I set up the Macbook Air (the new Travel Mac) by syncing my preferences, keychains, bookmarks, and mail settings. I then manually moved over applications as needed by copying the app and it’s related support files, this included Mail.

I then setup iDisk on the Local Mac and Travel Mac. Files I need on the road are saved to iDisk and reliably synced between machines.

Migration Assistant

Anytime a new computer arrives, it’s about a week of work and I spent that amount of time on the new Travel Mac, mostly syncing computers and moving over apps, as I described above. If I was setting up a new Local Mac, I would have just used Apple’s Migration Assistant. That utility has gotten better over the years and now even moves over webserver and developer settings. It works phenomenally well.

Squeeze Tube from Bottom and Flatten as you go up

The Local Mac has about 150 gigs on it and the Air’s SSD drive is 120, with space reserved for the OS, that’s about 100 gigs. Even setting up the Air for travel, I was forced to reduce what I use and choose wisely. I chose apps that I design, develop, and create with and was surprised by what I have installed and actually use.

I included VMware Fusion on the Travel Mac for a couple PC apps and if I need to test blogs on the road in Internet Explorer.

As I create media on the Travel Mac, I’ll move it over to external drives or the Local Mac. Interestingly, I no longer care about having my entire library with me on an iPod; now just take what I need with 8gs. Same thing with the Travel Computer. Don’t really need 9 years of emails to search or find a funny thing I said to Zeldman once on a panel somewhere.

iPhone

Ah yes the perennial problem of syncing an iPod or iPhone to multiple computers. In the latest version of iTunes, yes you can set up playlists for each machine to the iPod/iPhone but that gets complicated and is a manual sync on each computer. Same problem as keeping two computers in sync, I’d forget to sync and wonder where the latest Strongbad Email was. I decided to use the Shiny Thing’s hack.

The hack allows me to automagically sync my iPhone with the Local Mac and then manually sync it to the Travel Mac, as needed. Again, I’m reducing complexity and can just store music on the iPhone, moving files back and forth on the Travel Mac.

Being Virtual

When at Hugga HQ, I use OSX Screen Sharing to share screens and work between the Travel Mac and Local Mac. I can also run Windows XP when I need it.

Caption: Travel Mac with a virtual Windows XP window and connected to the Local Mac with OSX Screen Sharing.

Bloggers

After the Travel Mac was all set up with apps, I got an instance of Movable Type Pro running in about 5 minutes. Back in the day, that was an afternoon of work. Now, OSX ships with Apache, Perl, SQLite, and other web technologies ready to roll. I copied over a previous SQlite database, installed MT in the CGI-BIN directory, and boom. I’m local hosting MT and my blogs. I didn’t have to download and make one Perl file!

Backup

I back up everything all the time using Time Machine. I travel with a rugged Lacie drive and back up the Travel Mac.

To Kona and Testing

Tomorrow we leave for Kona to ride some bike miles, relax, and thoroughly test the Travel Mac. I’m looking forward to carrying around a 3 pound laptop v. 5 pounds and seeing how all this reduction in computer complexity plays out. As for gadgets, were taking an iBike Pro, Sony HDR-TG1, and Garmin Etrex for testing, blogging, and GPSing our routes.

Posts from the road soon …

Originally posted by DL Byron from Bike Hugger, on December 29, 2008 9:00 AM

Disaster Girl, Photographer Dave Roth, Disaster Girl on Buzzfeed, Disaster Girl animation, Responses to Disaster Girl. For more Know Your Meme visit http://www.knowyourmeme.com

Originally posted by hello@rocketboom.com (Rocketboom) from Rocketboom, on December 29, 2008 5:55 AM

Age: 38
Hometown: Fairfax VA
Where do you now live?: Washington DC
Where would you most like to live?: Canary Islands
Who was your first "hero" in life?: Speed Racer
What is your favorite thing to do on your day off from work?: I quit my day job
What is your favorite color?: Clear
Who (or what) do you love?: Anything with alcohol in it (including people)

Wooster: Who and/or what are some of your influences?

Classical music this week, natural landscapes, watching animals--especially albinos

Wooster: What other artists do you most admire?

EvanRoth(fi5e), BLU, Jorge Rodriguez, Anthony Micallef, CON, Truth, TILT, Eric il Cane, Leon Reid, Brad Downey, Slinkachu, Judge Judy and dead, Juan Munoz

How would you describe your art to someone who could not see it? That it can be hard to identify as art

Wooster: What other talent would most like to have?

The ability to be 10 years younger

Wooster: What do you fear the most?

Dying in my sleep so that I miss the experience of it

Wooster: What is your greatest ambition?

Right now to write different words on the sidewalk with popcorn and watch the birds eat it, but they're mostly south right now so I'm going to wait until spring.

You can see more of Mark's work here.

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Wooster Collective, on December 29, 2008 3:34 AM

Originally posted in Cool Tools

Micofinancing is among the better ways for the haves to help the have-nots. Small loans are made to poor but ambitious workers, who expand their livelihoods with the small loan and then pay it back. Which is then lent out again. The previously recommended agencies Opportunity International, and Trickle UP are great tools for individuals in developed countries to kick-start other folk's self-development. These agencies do the hard work of identifying and training the recipients, and tracking loans and performance.

But why not use the peer-to-peer model to allow individuals with money to loan to specific individuals in need of a small loan? That's what Kiva does and it works wonderfully.

Kiva enables you to make small $25 or above loans to an individual or small group of individuals in a developing country. They use these small loans (aggregated to about $200-$400) to finance a food stall, repair shop, hair salon, sewing machine, new cash crop, etc. When they pay it back to you in about 11 months, you can then re-lend it to another person of your choice.

The advantages of Kiva over the other worthy agencies are three fold. One, you can direct your loans to the kind of projects or livelihood you deem the most important or the most sympathetic. Maybe you are into food so you gravitate to funding small cafes or local fruit growers. Or maybe you think women's sewing centers are a key. Secondly you have more direct contact with the borrowers. They have names, faces, stories. Not a few Kiva lenders have met up with folks they have lent to. Thirdly, while most microfiance agencies are thrifty, Kiva is particularly thin in administration thanks to the well-designed software platform that runs this service.

The payback rate for Kiva is about 97%. That's a better "investment" than stocks this past year! The variety of folks you can lend to is exhilarating. The karma is good. These loans make a difference. Kiva lends $1 million dollars every 10 days. It is easy to do. A few folks are already on their third cycle of re-loaning the same money they first put up three years ago.

I think the peer-to-peer lending service of Kiva is such a wonderful tool that I have started a Cool Tools Lending Team. The intention is to gather like-minded folks to make microloans to folks needing tools to start or build a livelihood. I've seeded the team with the first $300 of loans to three borrowers planing to use the loans for tools and I'll add up to $1,000 of Cool Tool's ad revenue as the team identifies borrowers hoping to secure tools. Ideally, other Cool Tool readers will join me in lending small amounts to enable others to self-develop and remake their lives. If you are interested, please join me at the Kiva Cool Tools Team.

-- KK

Kiva

Kiva Cool Tools Team

Sample entrepreneur:

My name is Khursheed Bibi. I am a fifty-year-old woman. I have lived in the city of Pakpattan, Pakistan, for 15 years. My husband, Mr. Rafiq, is a mason. I have three kids: one son and two daughters. My son runs a furniture making business. My elder daughter is in 9th standard and my younger in 8th standard. I run a decorative embroidery business. I embroider dresses and sell them in clothing markets. I charge $3 per dress. I invest my income in my daughters' education (paying school and tuition fees). I've successfully repaid two previous loans from Asasah (a microfinance institute of Pakistan). Now I am applying again for a loan to buy lumber to expand my son's furniture making business. I am the leader of a group of entrepreneurs sharing this loan.

Originally posted by (author unknown) from KK Lifestream, on December 29, 2008 3:00 AM

Micofinancing is among the better ways for the haves to help the have-nots. Small loans are made to poor but ambitious workers, who expand their livelihoods with the small loan and then pay it back. Which is then lent out again. The previously recommended agencies Opportunity International, and Trickle Up are great tools for individuals in developed countries to kick-start other folk's self-development. These agencies do the hard work of identifying and training the recipients, and tracking loans and performance.

But why not use the peer-to-peer model to allow individuals with money to loan to specific individuals in need of a small loan? That's what Kiva does and it works wonderfully.

Kiva enables you to make small $25 or above loans to an individual or small group of individuals in a developing country. They use these small loans (aggregated to about $200-$400) to finance a food stall, repair shop, hair salon, sewing machine, new cash crop, etc. When they pay it back to you in about 11 months, you can then re-lend it to another person of your choice.

The advantages of Kiva over the other worthy agencies are three fold. One, you can direct your loans to the kind of projects or livelihood you deem the most important or the most sympathetic. Maybe you are into food so you gravitate to funding small cafes or local fruit growers. Or maybe you think women's sewing centers are a key. Secondly you have more direct contact with the borrowers. They have names, faces, stories. Not a few Kiva lenders have met up with folks they have lent to. Thirdly, while most microfiance agencies are thrifty, Kiva is particularly thin in administration thanks to the well-designed software platform that runs this service.

The payback rate for Kiva is about 97%. That's a better "investment" than stocks this past year! The variety of folks you can lend to is exhilarating. The karma is good. These loans make a difference. Kiva lends $1 million dollars every 10 days. It is easy to do. A few folks are already on their third cycle of re-loaning the same money they first put up three years ago.

I think the peer-to-peer lending service of Kiva is such a wonderful tool that I have started a Cool Tools Lending Team. The intention is to gather like-minded folks to make microloans to folks needing tools to start or build a livelihood. I've seeded the team with the first $300 of loans to three borrowers planing to use the loans for tools and I'll add up to $1,000 of Cool Tool's ad revenue as the team identifies borrowers hoping to secure tools. Ideally, other Cool Tool readers will join me in lending small amounts to enable others to self-develop and remake their lives. If you are interested, please join me at the Kiva Cool Tools Team.

-- KK

UPDATE: Good news and bad news. Good news is that word-of-mouth praise drew many folks to Kiva this holiday season and all available lendees have been funded. There were several thousand a week ago, so this is a great thing. Bad news is that if you are headed there for the first time, you won't find anyone to loan to. I trust this is temporary but I have no idea when they'll be an "inventory" of loan candidates. When there are lendees available, you can join the Cool Tools team by signing up for the team, then making a loan to an individual in the ordinary way and choosing Cool Tools from the Team option when you "checkout."

Kiva

Kiva Cool Tools Team

Sample entrepreneur:

My name is Khursheed Bibi. I am a fifty-year-old woman. I have lived in the city of Pakpattan, Pakistan, for 15 years. My husband, Mr. Rafiq, is a mason. I have three kids: one son and two daughters. My son runs a furniture making business. My elder daughter is in 9th standard and my younger in 8th standard. I run a decorative embroidery business. I embroider dresses and sell them in clothing markets. I charge $3 per dress. I invest my income in my daughters' education (paying school and tuition fees). I've successfully repaid two previous loans from Asasah (a microfinance institute of Pakistan). Now I am applying again for a loan to buy lumber to expand my son's furniture making business. I am the leader of a group of entrepreneurs sharing this loan.

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Cool Tools, on December 29, 2008 3:00 AM

Hugger Industries posted a photo:

Doesn't even smell like Pedros.

--
Sent from bMobile -- please excuse terseness.

Originally posted by Hugger Industries from Bike Hugger, on December 28, 2008 5:00 PM

Edith Macefield’s tiny house, built in 1900, surrounded by development in the Ballard neighborhood in Seattle. She refused offers of $1 million to sell it to developers.

She passed away in June and left some mysteries behind, including her novel, Where Yesterday Began.

The book is 1,138 pages long, not counting the musical references, from Scottish folk songs to a 1915 work by the English composer Albert W. Ketelbey, and a 16-page glossary of the French, German and Italian phrases sprinkled throughout.

The book is dedicated to “B. Robert Aigner, M.D.,” with no explanation why. Reached by phone at his home in a Seattle suburb, Dr. Aigner, 80, said he remembered Ms. Macefield was a patient, but nothing more.

Dr. Aigner, a neurologist, was amazed and amused that Ms. Macefield would have dedicated her ambitious work to him. He had never heard of it.

Originally posted by ry from Modcult, on December 28, 2008 10:21 AM

Shared by Bud
A good explanation of Google Ajax APIs, particularly Google loader and ClientLocation. Link to how to get API key.

Google has a number of AJAX APIs that you can use in your web pages with noserver side code, including the Maps API, the AJAX Search API, and the AJAXFeed API. To use any or all of them in your web pages, you need onlyinclude a single <script> tag at the top of your webpage with your Google API key:

Originally posted by (author unknown) from code.google.com, on December 28, 2008 7:32 AM

Shared by Bud
How to use the Google data apis from javascript. I'd like to see something on how to combine app engine in the mix.

This document describes how to use the JavaScript client library to send Google Data API queries and interpret returned responses.

Originally posted by (author unknown) from code.google.com, on December 28, 2008 7:32 AM

Shared by Bud
The problem with the proposed library, lxml, is that it requires compiling c libraries to run, a real pain in the neck.

When people think about web scraping in Python, they usually think BeautifulSoup. That’s okay, but I would encourage you to also consider lxml.

First, people think BeautifulSoup is better at parsing broken HTML. This is not correct. lxml parses broken HTML quite nicely. I haven’t done any thorough testing, but at least the BeautifulSoup broken HTML example is parsed better by lxml (which knows that <td> elements should go inside <table> elements).

Second, people feel lxml is harder to install. This is correct. BUT, lxml 2.2alpha1 includes an option to compile static versions of the underlying C libraries, which should improve the installation experience, especially on Macs. To install this new way, try:

$ STATIC_DEPS=true easy_install 'lxml>=2.2alpha1'

One you have lxml installed, you have a great parser (which happens to be super-fast and that is not a tradeoff). You get a fairly familiar API based on ElementTree, which though a little strange feeling at first, offers a compact and canonical representation of a document tree, compared to more traditional representations. But there’s more…

One of the features that should be appealing to many people doing screen scraping is that you get CSS selectors. You can use XPath as well, but usually that’s more complicated (for example). Here’s an example I found getting links from a menu in a page in BeautifulSoup:

from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulSoup
import urllib2
soup = BeautifulSoup(urllib2.urlopen('http://java.sun.com').read())
menu = soup.findAll('div',attrs={'class':'pad'})
for subMenu in menu:
    links = subMenu.findAll('a')
    for link in links:
        print "%s : %s" % (link.string, link['href'])

Here’s the same example in lxml:

from lxml.html import parse
doc = parse('http://java.sun.com').getroot()
for link in doc.cssselect('div.pad a'):
    print '%s: %s' % (link.text_content(), link.get('href'))

lxml generally knows more about HTML than BeautifulSoup. Also I think it does well with the small details; for instance, the lxml example will match elements in <div class="pad menu"> (space-separated classes), which the BeautifulSoup example does not do (obviously there are other ways to search, but the obvious and documented technique doesn’t pay attention to HTML semantics).

One feature that I think is really useful is .make_links_absolute(). This takes the base URL of the page (doc.base) and uses it to make all the links absolute. This makes it possible to relocate snippets of HTML or whole sets of documents (as with this program). This isn’t just <a href> links, but stylesheets, inline CSS with @import statements, background attributes, etc. It doesn’t see quite all links (for instance, links in Javascript) but it sees most of them, and works well for most sites. So if you want to make a local copy of a site:

from lxml.html import parse, open_in_browser
doc = parse('http://wiki.python.org/moin/').getroot()
doc.make_links_absolute()
open_in_browser(doc)

open_in_browser serializes the document to a temporary file and then opens a web browser (using webbrowser).

Here’s an example that compares two pages using lxml.html.diff:

from lxml.html.diff import htmldiff
from lxml.html import parse, tostring, open_in_browser, fromstring

def get_page(url):
    doc = parse(url).getroot()
    doc.make_links_absolute()
    return tostring(doc)

def compare_pages(url1, url2, selector='body div'):
    basis = parse(url1).getroot()
    basis.make_links_absolute()
    other = parse(url2).getroot()
    other.make_links_absolute()
    el1 = basis.cssselect(selector)[0]
    el2 = other.cssselect(selector)[0]
    diff_content = htmldiff(tostring(el1), tostring(el2))
    diff_el = fromstring(diff_content)
    el1.getparent().insert(el1.getparent().index(el1), diff_el)
    el1.getparent().remove(el1)
    return basis

if __name__ == '__main__':
    import sys
    doc = compare_pages(sys.argv[1], sys.argv[2], sys.argv[3])
    open_in_browser(doc)

You can use it like:

$ python lxmldiff.py 
'http://wiki.python.org/moin/BeginnersGuide?action=recall&rev=70' 
'http://wiki.python.org/moin/BeginnersGuide?action=recall&rev=81' 
'div#content'

Another feature lxml has is form handling. All the cool sexy new sites use minimal forms, but searching for "registration forms" I get this nice complex form. Let’s look at it:

>>> from lxml.html import parse, tostring
>>> doc = parse('http://www.actuaryjobs.com/cform.html').getroot()
>>> doc.forms
[<Element form at -48232164>]
>>> form = doc.forms[0]
>>> form.inputs.keys()
['thank_you_title', 'City', 'Zip', ... ]

Now we have a form object. There’s two ways to get to the fields: form.inputs, which gives us a dictionary of all the actual <input> elements (and textarea and select). There’s also form.fields, which is a dictionary-like object. The dictionary-like object is convenient, for instance:

>>> form.fields['cEmail'] = 'me@example.com'

This actually updates the input element itself:

>>> tostring(form.inputs['cEmail'])
'<input type="input" name="cEmail" size="30" value="test2">'

I think it’s actually a nicer API than htmlfill and can serve the same purpose on the server side.

But then you can also use the same interface for scraping, by filling fields and getting the submission. That looks like:

>>> import urllib
>>> action = form.action
>>> data = urllib.urlencode(form.form_values())
>>> if form.method == 'GET':
...     if '?' in action:
...         action += '&' + data
...     else:
...         action += '?' + data
...     data = None
>>> resp = urllib.urlopen(action, data)
>>> resp_doc = parse(resp).getroot()

Lastly, there’s HTML cleaning. I think all these features work together well, do useful things, and it’s based on an actual understanding HTML instead of just treating tags and attributes as arbitrary. (Also if you really like jQuery, you might want to look at pyquery, which is a jQuery-like API on top of lxml).

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Ian Bicking: a blog, on December 28, 2008 7:31 AM

stanislav katz is an industrial designer from latvia, one of his design proposals is this 'fan clock'.
colored space between the hour and minute hands suggest a traditional folded hand-fan.


'fan clock'

other designs by katz include the 'cheese' cheese grater and the 'hanger mirror'.


'cheese' cheese grater


cheese hanger mirror

more

stanislav katz: http://www.stanislavkatz.com
---
via id served

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Designboom - Weblog, on December 28, 2008 1:45 AM