Rubik's Cube Sandwich
I love the '80s. But maybe not this much. The "Rubix Cubewich" contains "cubes of pastrami, kielbasa, pork fat, salami, and two types of cheddar."
« July 12, 2009 - July 18, 2009 | Main | July 26, 2009 - August 1, 2009 »
July 25, 2009
July 24, 2009
New Project: TPM Twitter Rooms
Whatever else Twitter might be, we've found it a good way of to keep tabs on politicos and reporters, what they're doing, saying and so forth. Pols make unguarded or revealing statements, sometimes just helpful heads-ups on events or statements; reporters give early tips on stories. And just atmospherically you can get a feel for what certain groups of people are thinking and talking about. It's not perfect. Obviously, people know they're being listened to. But it's still a very useful tool.
So with that in mind we set up a series of Twitter rooms that pull together the Twitter feeds of different groups. Here's the feeds for Elected Dems on Capitol Hill, Elected Republicans on Capitol Hill, Democratic and liberal insiders, Republican and conservative insiders and reporters and bloggers.
Each page is auto-updating every few minutes.
The elected officials on Capitol Hill rooms should include every representative and senator on the Hill who has a Twitter account. The others obviously required some subjective judgment as to who to include. But they're fairly comprehensive. And obviously if there are people who you think we should add to one of the lists, please let us know.
They're permanently linked on our front page, below the fold on the right, just across from our masthead.
SOHH EXCLUSIVE: Ghostface Says Alicia Keys "Just Stood The Kid Up" For R&B Collabo
Ghostface Killah tells SOHH about the collaborations that won't appear on his upcoming album, The Wizard of Poetry, including one request for an Alicia Keys collabo that never happened.
[Visit SOHH.com for more information]
The ultimate Topps “gimmick”
Take a look at the ultimate treasure from 2009 Topps Allen & Ginter. It is a DNA relic of 16th President of the United States, Abraham Lincoln. While I am not sure where the hair came from, a quick inspection makes me wonder if that is one of Honest Abe’s eye lashes. Creepy? Absolutely.
Odds of pulling one of these DNA relic cards are 1:186,000 packs. In case you might be wondering, I was not the lucky collector who pulled this 1/1 card. With just two days left it has garnered 23 bids as is up to over $6,000 dollars at the moment, although the reserve price has yet to be reached.
For you Lincoln fans, we’ll call you “Logheads”, Steven Spielberg is bringing Abe to the big screen in 2011. All anyone knows at the moment is that Lincoln will be played by Liam Neeson, who was born in Ireland. Yeah, I’m a little confused by that as well.
You can follow the eBay auction HERE.
(h/t – SloweyT)
My to-do list always grows post-OSCON
Every year at OSCON I come home with a head full of ideas, and better yet, a huge list of new things to work on. Since the book is now done, and OSCON is now over, there's a chance I could work on them.
- Ack plug-ins
- I've been wanting to have plug-ins for ack for at least a year now, and I've connected with a number of people like Randy J. Ray who are on board to help me out. First task: Move it on over to github.
- Coverity scans for Parrot
- Met with David Maxwell of Coverity and he fired up the Coverity bot for Parrot, and now I have new niggling bugs to pick at.
- PR work for first big release of Rakudo
- There will be the first major release of Rakudo in spring 2010, and I got some plans going with Patrick Michaud to figure how we were going to build up buzz for that. I also have the notes from Damian's Perl 6 talk which are a fantastic summary of Perl 6's cool new features.
- Human Creativity
- Julian Cash has been having Jos Boumans do all his Perl work for the Human Creativity project, but I offered up my services to do whatever he wants. Turns out the Julian is also working with Devin Crain, who I've known for years in an entirely non-geeek context.
- Hiring horror stories
- Got some great response to my talk on job interviewing, and as always the stories resound the most. I talked to a few people afterwards who said they'd give me some horror stories I can run on The Working Geek as instructive examples of how not to do things, and why they're so awful.
For those of you leaving OSCON, what tasks did you just assign yourself in the past week?
100 years of design manifestos
John Emerson has collected a number of design manifestos dating back to 1909.
Tags: design John Emerson listsSince the days of radical printer-pamphleteers, design and designers have a long history of fighting for what's right and working to transform society. The rise of the literary form of the manifesto also parallels the rise of modernity and the spread of letterpress printing.
“Where The Wild Things Are” Is Good Enough For Maurice Sendak
While hipsters and Choire are falling all over themselves in anticipation of Spike Jonze’s forthcoming Where The Wild Things Are, I have been a little less enthusiastic. I mean, sure, I like Arcade Fire just fine, and the preview had its moments, but there’s something about the seemingly obvious ways in which they’ve opened up the story (oh no, Max is upset about his mom’s new boyfriend!) that rub me wrong. That said, this feature with author Maurice Sendak puts me slightly more at ease. I’ll give it a shot, I guess. But if Michel Gondry explains the titular character’s desire for solitude as an expression of millennial discontent in his forthcoming adaptation of One Was Johnny (starring Viggo Mortensen as the robber) I reserve the right to be pissed off.
How Quickly We Forget
I don't understand why commentators persist in saying this week that Barack Obama avoided any discussion of race during the presidential campaign. Which campaign were they covering?
Here's Jack Cafferty on CNN from this afternoon:
Isn't it ironic, he went through the whole presidential campaign, with nary a nod toward any sort of racial problems in this country, and at the tail end of a news conference the other night he stepped right in it up to his eyebrows.You might argue that Obama didn't make race the centerpiece of his campaign or that he was careful not to explicitly shoulder the burden of centuries of black grievances. (The symbolic shouldering of those grievances was something the first serious black candidate for President, whoever he turned out to be, would not be able to shrug off easily.) But it's wildly inaccurate to say that he ignored race during the campaign, even if he declined to play-act in the highly choreographed racial set-pieces that linger in our politics.
The most overt and significant of his "nods" to race was the March 18, 2008 "A More Perfect Union" speech. Given in the midst of the long Democratic primary, with the Rev. Wright controversy still roiling, it was the biggest news event of the day, as I recall, covered live and in full by all the cable news networks, and universally praised for its nuance and candidness.
It was a speech that Cafferty himself blogged about at the time. His description then suggested Obama did more than merely give race a nod: "In the face of a withering barrage of taped replays by the media of Wright's comments, Obama had little choice but to suck it up and face the issue head on."
And so he did.
Café Grumpy Will Start Roasting Their Own — Grub Street: New York Magazine’s Food and Restaurant Blog
Fresh on the heels of opening their third location, Grumpy will soon start roasting their own. They’ll join Jamie from Abraço up in Greenpoint, but if you follow Liz Clayton’s flickr, you’ve already seen the sneak peek;
via Liz Clayton
For more info, click the link below.
Posted in cafes, NYC Tagged: brewing, brooklyn, cafe, coffee, espresso, green coffee, ny magazine, probat, roasters
The New York Times Describes Online 'Membership' Plans
The New York Times has talked about charging again for some of its website; its CEO recently alluded to a "membership model with special offerings." What does that mean? Meet NYT Gold and NYT Silver.
A tipster was selected for a survey on nytimes.com and graciously copy/pasted from it for our benefit. The Times was gauging interest in two premium packages that it calls NYT Gold and NYT Silver. Market research is apparently ongoing and it's entirely possible, even likely, that the pricing and features outlined below aren't a final plan. But they are the most detail we've seen of just what the Times is hoping people will pay for on their web site as print revenue vanishes.
The packages carry an annual cost of $150 and $50, respectively, and emphasize behind-the-scenes benefits like newsroom tours, exclusive videos of reporters telling "the story behind the story" and ancient back issues. In this, the new packages repeat the core mistake of the Times' last, abortive effort at premium online content, the TimesSelect opinion section: Assuming people are fascinated with the Times as a brand, and with the deep thinking of its insiders. Really, most Web readers just like the news. But the NYT's most expensive and valuable product would seem to remain free under the new plan.
Aside from the tote bag, which could have a certain retro chic if the paper doesn't soon conquer its deep financial problems, the most compelling benefit is called FirstLook and gives paying customers an early peek at the news: "You'll... get access to some stories before they appear in print or online." However, whether this is an early look at a political scoop or the Dining section isn't clear.
UPDATE: Times spokeswoman Diane McNulty writes, "It's very early in the process. We are still in the data collection phase."
The Times' plans, as outlined in an nytimes.com user survey:
(Top pic: Times chairman Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, Jr, by JD Lasica)
In which I have been drunk for two days and suspect foul play
Apologies for any greater than usual levels of incoherence you might encounter here tonight. I appear to STILL be drunk. I have had no alcohol since last night, when I had two small glasses of wine. Something is wrong here.
If my friends weren't a respectable pair of solicitors with three children I would suspect them of spiking my drink last night, because I have been Drunk Drunk Drunk Staggering Incapable Inappropriate for the last 36 hours, which, even being something of an appalling lightweight (for reasons explained here), is a hell of a result for a bit of Shiraz.
Exhibit 1
I arrive home last night (at around 8, this was hardly a wild night of debauchery, even by Brussels standards) and collapse on the front step snickering hopelessly, slapping my cheeks ineffectually to try and restore some feeling to my numb head. Have to make CFO put the children to bed. Fall onto the sofa weeping and eating dry crackers and watched an hour of grave, doom laden, sensational Channel Five programming about HEADSHRINKING which I find endlessly, inexplicably hilarious. I spend the rest of the evening staring into space, eating chocolate buttons and signally failing to go to bed at an appropriate time.
Exhibit 2
I head off, late, panicky, ill-equipped, with a bag full of craft supplies, small stones and dinosaur posters, to Paris to renew Fingers passport and finally meet the other half of my brain, blog regular M. First stop (after walking painfully four times round the Place de la Madeleine looking for the wrong street whilst determined not to make like a tourist and ask): the British Consulate, where, to my horror, I am required to hand over my handbag to the security guard.
"Euh, il y a des sciseaux. Et, euh, désolée pour le reste" (*)
Then I watch in horror as, snapping on his rubber glove (in this case an entirely appropriate precaution) he handles several disintegrating leaves, a bag for picking up dog crap, a box of cheap crayons, several items of Bonne Maman packaging, some pieces of Kinder toy and a child's sock. (M, please confirm I am not exaggerating the contents of my handbag)
Exhibit 3
I go to WHSmiths and spend ten fruitless minutes looking for glue, apparently thinking I have been magically transported via some secret trapdoor to the Liverpool Street Branch (for future reference: they don't have Pritt Stick in Paris WH Smiths).
Then I go and sit on the steps in the Tuileries and fashion a rudimentary puppet out of creme caramel packets, sellotape and googly eyes brought expressly from Brussels for this purpose. My brain twin turns up without her puppet. I look ridiculous but I don't care as FINALLY, I have my hands on small Fimo models of dinosaurs.
Exhibit 4
My brain twin and I follow the ponies in the Tuileries round, sniffing their delicious pony smell, like demented freaks. We photograph a snakeheaded fairground ride and a giant bearded animatronic gorilla and I get in trouble from a vielle dame for having leaf mould on my arse. I get my foot stuck in two grates. Because I apparently believe M actually does share my actual brain I tell her terrible, disgusting things, appalling her into silence as we stomp around Paris acquiring cakes. Expressions used include: 'tumour donkey', 'cock stump', and 'unusually thick, spongy layer of skin'.
Exhibit 5
I read French Elle sex tips in wide eyed fascination on the train home whilst shedding crumbs from a gigantic macaroon all down my front, sharing a table with three Japanese tourists. When I go to the loo and look in the mirror, I realise my nose is powdered and sticky with icing, like in a scandalous paparazzi shot of some coked-up starlet.
Exhibit 6
I CHEER when the right tram turns up on my platform. Metaphorical winds whistle around the Gare du Midi as the commuters stare blankly at me. I pretend it was the teenage boys standing next to me, and turn and stare at them. I fear it is not convincing.
Exhibit 7
I am unable to assemble the cableage, wherewithal, or mental faculties to upload the priceless photography that should accompany this post. Instead it will, I hope, serve to illustrate Dr Capybara's incredibly bad tempered advice column tomorrow.
Note: Although Dr Capybara's casebook is already extremely full for this week, if you have a particular pressing, embarassing, or otherwise entertaining problem for him to deride, do put it in the comments.
(*) Er, I have scissors [Eds note: for puppet making purposes]. Sorry about .. the rest.
Look Who's Talkin': Comments, Quips, and Tips We Have Known and Loved
There's so much going on in Talk week to week that we almost can't keep up. If you're in the same boat, here's a small selection of topics and responses that have piqued our interest this week.
Romantical Food Memories...
"I once made my boyfriend 3 grilled cheese sandwiches in a single evening. ;)" —gastronomeg
The Quickest Snack from Home Instead of Junk Food?
"Seriously, there is nothing like a crisp apple. Or a bunch of grapes. Right now, it's strawberries. If you have a fridge, I like some cheese & fruit (white cheddar & apple, brie & dried cranberries, pepper jack & pineapple). I keep a box of Triscuits & some peanut butter at work for just in case. I love the combo of apple with Triscuit and pb." —wookie
Eating Out at Lunch — Great ... and Cheap!
"I don't do this anymore, but in college I was a big bulk-aisle grazer. And that makes me think ... has there ever been a discussion on dumpster-diving around here? (Gotta search that...) That's another thing I used to do. Ain't nothing more cheap than free!" —sailordave
What Is Appealing About Beer?
A song for the ages, by Tom T. Hall.
"There's a lot to appreciate about beer. Yes, it's bitter, but there are other flavors as well, and a lot of great beers are about the balance of flavors, not just the dominance of bitterness.
"I think that beer fans do a disservice by saying to people that beer is an acquired taste as if you have to choke down beer at first, or work your way up from "starter" beers like training wheels." —shoneyjoe
Mac and Cheese?
"This is my go-to recipe. The only change I make is Butterkase (when I can get it) instead of Muenster...." —grampart
[I so want to try this recipe. Thanks for posting it! —AK]
Serious Help: Convincing Someone to Change Their Eating Habits
"I applaud you for saying something, but once you've done that, there's nothing else you can do. Unless the problem is insane and you could get on some talk show with him." —sorahatch
Tofu (For Carnivores...)?
"Yes, drain the tofu! Are you pressing the tofu? I sometimes press it overnight when I want a really firm texture. Have you tried tempeh or seitan? Seitan in particular seems very meat-like." —KarynMC
Going to Mad Men Party and Need to Bring Food
"...Okay, so I'm probably the only person on this site who was alive in the 60s, so listen to the voice of experience:
"Rule Number One: Garnish everything with canned pimientos.
Rule Number Two: Put a couple of eggshells into the percolator basket when brewing coffee.
Rule Number Three: Don't be afraid to put vegetables in your Jello.
Rule Number Four: If you don't have Tupperware, wrap everything with waxed paper...." —betteirene"101 Salads for the Season"
"I think there was a little bit of a stretch to reach 101...perhaps finding the 25 best would have been advisable." —savecara
Don't Get Between Me and My Häagen-Dazs
"My friend saw me in line at Kroger with a box of Tampons, a huge bottle of Advil, and three pints of Ben & Jerry's. She just nodded at me and smiled sympathetically. I probably could have just put the Advil back, because sometimes the only cure is ice cream." —juliebugsmama
Can You Tell Personality By Buffet Plate?
"Dear God I hope not. Of course my buffet plates look like my desk at work. Piles everywhere but I know where everything is. So maybe you can." —joeqboo
Expresso vs Espresso: A Pro-Expresso Rant
"Seriously, it isn't that big a deal. When one language borrows a word from another language, there is bound to be phonological change since two no two languages have the same phonology. If you REALLY wanted to be true to the word, the second and third s's form a geminate, and it should be pronounced es pres so not es pre so. While you're at it, penne should be pronounced pen ne not pe ne. Without the double n you are saying a dirty word. And I'm pretty sure it's NOT what you want for supper!" —blankplate
Waffles or Pancakes?
I think we know where Robyn stands on the issue.
"D. All of the above. If I had to choose...if the pancakes were my mom's, it would be that, without question. They're so good, I don't even put syrup on them. I live in a different state from her and have regular cravings for them, but don't even attempt them because I know mine are not even close. Anyway, if not hers...it'd probably be this cream-cheese stuffed French toast from one of my favorite cafes/bakeries. It is insanely good, and I refuse to think about how many calories are in it." —kimberlymac
And Congrats Are in Order To ...
Therealchiffonade, who had a recipe published in Martha Stewart's Everyday Food magazine!
Related: It's a Little Quiet in This Corner—Talk Topics That Could Use Some Love
Features of 4.3: Entry Pagination
Up until the general release of MT 4.3 (beta info here), we are publishing details on the features of 4.3. Today we're looking at entry pagination.
1,000 Entries
One of the categories on my blog is now up to nearly 1,000 entries and it has become difficult to display them. Movable Type offers the ability to split up the category content by date (e.g., Category-Monthly archives), but that would still require me to publish all of the content statically. I could use dynamic publishing, but then I would lose the speed of a statically published page on the front-end.
Situations like these, and a long-standing pubilc request, is why we're now introducing a dynamic way to paginate your index and archive templates using MT-Search. With this solution, you're able to publish the first 10 or 20 (or whatever you'd like) entries statically and paginate through the remainder dynamically. What's even better is that it only requires a few changes to your index or archive template to generate the content for MT-Search.
Getting Pagination on Your Blog
We've put together a guide to paginating with static templates that provides details on the new querystring parameters and sample template code. It's based on the classic template set included in MTOS, but could certainly be used as an example for other template sets. If you see any issues or improvements we can make, please leave comments here or on that page!
Bonus Feature!
In addition to allowing for entry pagination, you can now limit your searches by author, category or date. For example, if I was going to search my blog for 'sneaker', the URL would look like this:
http://mydomain.com/cgi-bin/mt/mt-search.cgi?IncludeBlogs=1&search=sneakerIf I wanted it to limit it to only entries in 2007, I'd use this:
http://mydomain.com/cgi-bin/mt/mt-search.cgi?IncludeBlogs=1&search=sneaker&archive_type=Yearly&year=2007If I only wanted to look in the category 'Design', which has an ID of 40, I'd use this:
http://mydomain.com/cgi-bin/mt/mt-search.cgi?IncludeBlogs=1&search=sneaker&category=40And if I wanted to limit to an author with the ID of 2, I'd use this:
http://mydomain.com/cgi-bin/mt/mt-search.cgi?IncludeBlogs=1&search=sneaker&author=2The one caveat here is that, unlike entry pagination, you'll need to use the search template for these. See the entry pagination guide for more details.
Things I read, things I ate, things I love
Just a reminder that in the summer brain-melty absence of any long meaty posts here you will find shorter dispatches over at my food tumblr, where currently I am reporting on the lovable and unlovable foods of Moscow. If you’re still bored after that, read Bennett on what isn’t a writer’s job, Lukas’s always wonderful blog, and also I am super late to the party of new favorite Bike Snob NYC.
2009 Tour de France
The 96th Tour de France cycling race is currently underway, with the final, 21st stage of the 3,445 km (2,141 mi) race coming up on Sunday, July 26th. At this time, Alberto Contado of Kazakh team Astana appears to be headed toward a second tour title, currently leading riders Andy Schleck of Team Saxo Bank and Luxembourg and, in 3rd place, Lance Armstrong, also of team Astana. Armstrong's recent emergence from retirement to return to this year's tour has been the focus of much of this year's media coverage. 180 riders in twenty teams started in Monaco on July 4th, heading for the final ride into Paris this weekend. Collected here are a handful of images from the 2009 race. (40 photos total)
The thin island of Manhattan
According to a recently released study, 42% of Manhattan dwellers are overweight or obese, compared to 67% nationally.
Manhattan is the national capital of disparate subcultures of the skinny: Aspiring models. Nightclubbing hipsters. Gay men with the time and money to chisel their physiques at the gym. Park Avenue society matrons who remain preternaturally slender into their 70s, the "social X-rays" satirized by Tom Wolfe.
When 2/3 of the American population is considered outside the normal range when it comes to their BMI, how long will it be before the standards are modified to reflect the new norms?
Tags: NYC obesity
RIP 'We Are Happy to Serve You' Coffee Cups?
Photograph from valentinapowers on Flickr
In the paper cup world, this one is pretty famous, but it may soon be as endangered as the Florida manatee. Jeremiah of the blog Jeremiah's Vanishing New York recently ordered a chocolate egg cream at Ray's Candy Store, excepting it to come in the typical short blue cup with iconic Greek font, spelling out the chipper "We Are Happy to Serve You" message. But it didn't. Instead it came in a Wolfgang Puck coffee cup. Lame.
It's becoming harder and harder to find corner bodegas and street carts serving hot beverages in these cups—instead, they're being replaced with those advertising pharmaceuticals, banks, or something else you probably don't care as much about. City Room recently investigated this endangered cup species, noting that the new wave of random cups "are called 'misprints'... they are overruns, discontinued prints, leftovers from promotions, or the results of cup-using vendors who go bankrupt, leaving the manufacturer with unwanted cups."
It all started in the mid-1960s when the Sherri Cup Company of Kensington, Connecticut, designed the cup for the hundreds of Greek coffee shops operating in the city, noted Rodger Stevens in this New York Times piece in 2005. "Greek motifs continue to adorn up to 40 percent of 10-ounce cardboard cups in New York," Stevens pointed out.
But, sigh, that was the statistic in 2005. If you are nervous about the sustainability of the WAHTSY cup, you can order them in bulk here.
Related
What do your coffee mugs say about you? [Talk]
Coffee Cup in an Old Lens
11 Cool Coffee Mugs and Tea Cups
We’re currently considering putting out the first official...
We’re currently considering putting out the first official Awl t-shirt. Whaddya think?
Buzz: Rays talking about Scott Kazmir
Ed Price of AOL Fanhouse says the Rays may look to move Scott Kazmir, which, according to other reports, could free up money to help them acquire a pitcher like Cliff Lee or Roy Halladay.
Buster Olney of ESPN.com believes the Angels are interested in acquiring Kazmir.
…i have been getting lots of e-mail from fans who are worried Omar Minaya will make a trade like in 2004, when the Mets panicked and sent Scott Kazmir to Tampa Bay for Victor Zambrano, because, when seven games back of the Wild Card, like now, the team thought it would contend for the post season… instead, they traded a young arm in kazmir, missed the playoffs and hopefully have been regretting it ever since…
…how bizarre would it be, when in the same situation, essentially, the Mets traded to get kazmir back… i have no reason to think this will happen, and i am pretty much sure it will not, but it would an interesting twist of fate…
Kazmir had been 25–17 with a 3.49 ERA in 358 innings, during which he struck out 405 batters.
However, this season, in which he has spent time on the disabled list, he is just 4–6 with a 6.69 ERA, and just 58 strike outs.
The 25–year-old Kazmir will earn $20 million through 2011, after which he could become a free agent.
Wood, too much?
Wood, too much?
Originally uploaded by mwilkie.
Moral Hazard
A number of readers have written in about the post last night on the comparative danger of police work. The post noted that while police work is much more dangerous than the average job in the United States, it is by no means the most dangerous. That dubious honor goes to jobs like commercial fishing, construction, trucking and other similarly accident-prone professions.
The gist of most of these critiques was that you can't really evaluate the danger of the profession through injury and mortality rates because what's different about the job is that you frequently come into contact with actual people who want to hurt you and, much more frequently, situations where you don't know what you're going to find. And you have to ready to be confront someone who wants to do you or other people harm. This is a very good point. And I believe it only confirms TPM Reader JS's point from last night (which I strongly recommend), which was that the heroism of police work is not mainly about physical danger but moral courage and psychological stress.
The Gates' case can be taken as a case in point. Set aside the particular facts of this case and the various unknowns still swirling around it. A police officer needs to be able to respond to a call about a possible burglary, knowing he or she is going into a situation where they might find an actual burglar, who could be armed and might act in an unpredictable and lethal way. But they also need to be able to turn on a dime once it's clear it's not a burglar but the owner of the house, tired and coming home from a long trip. And on top of that, even though the cop was responding to help the owner of the home, the cop needs to be prepared for the fact the owner may be embarrassed or angry for being treated like a criminal in his own home. If that happens, the cop needs to be able to understand the reasonableness of the reaction and deescalate the situation -- not get into a macho pissing match which ends up getting decided in the favor of the cop because he has the handcuffs and the gun. (It's my strong sense that this is what happened in the Gates case.)
Someone who can manage that balance day in and day out is a great thing -- someone who can keep us all safe, on many levels, in an irreplaceable way. That's why cops are prone to a lot of mental and physical problems associated with dealing with that kind of stress and psychological turbulence year in and year out. There's a related balance the civilians among us need to be able to manage too -- to respect and honor the difficulty and heroism of the job done right while also not being cowed into treating criticism of bad police work as some kind of taboo. Because the ones who can't manage that balance need to be in another line of work.
Late Update: A regular emailer from Cambridge rather heatedly takes me to task for supposedly calling for the officer in the Gates case, Sgt. James Crowley, to be fired. I think it's obvious from what I wrote that I did not say that and that I was talking about policing in general -- that people who can't manage that very difficult balance should be in another line of work. But in case I'm wrong and this is the impression that people are getting -- let me just state clearly that I am definitely not calling for Crowley to lose his job.
Earning a Living
The Voice - watch more funny videos
Living without money
Daniel Suelo, who lives in a cave near Moab, Utah, has gone without using money since 2000.
"When I lived with money, I was always lacking," he writes. "Money represents lack. Money represents things in the past (debt) and things in the future (credit), but money never represents what is present."
The idea started to take shape when Suelo was on a Peace Corps mission to Ecuador. As he monitored the health of the population of the village he was staying in, he noticed that their health declined as they made more money -- "It looked like money was impoverishing them." You can find out more about Suelo's philosophy on his web site and follow his adventures on his blog, both of which he updates at the public library.
Tags: Daniel Suelo economics money
David Loewentstein's Window Installation
Friend, Paper Politics contributor and Reproduce & Revolt artist David Loewenstein has just installed a cool series of window installations at the Power and Light Building in Kansas City. David has filled the 10 ground floor windows of the building with large scale black and white paintings of strong, stylized graphics, at least one of which is in Reproduce & Revolt.
BNIM Architecture (ground floor windows)
106 W. 14th Street (Power and Light Building)
Kansas City, MOIf you're in KC, check out the install, and here are some pics:
The Pushbutton Web: Realtime Becomes Real
Pushbutton is a name for what I believe will be an upgrade for the web, where any site or application can deliver realtime messages to a web-scale audience, using free and open technologies at low cost and without relying on any single company like Twitter or Facebook. The pieces of this platform have just come together to enable a whole set of new features and applications that would have been nearly impossible for an average web developer to build in the past.
Background
The most interesting area of new development on the web is the innovation happening around realtime messaging, the ability to deliver updates to a website or application in one or two seconds. While various systems like Yahoo News Alerts or feed readers like Google Reader have offered some simple ways of delivering fairly fast notifications, they are still built on an infrastructure that relies upon requesting a web page repeatedly. These systems do the equivalent of hitting the "reload" button in your web browser over and over.
While those systems have been using these inefficient methods to deliver updates, newer platforms like Twitter, Facebook and FriendFeed have focused on building the infrastructure for efficient large-scale delivery of updates using their own proprietary networks. A lot of attention has been paid to Twitter's 140-character limit, or Facebook's News Feed, but the compelling technology that enables the user experience on these platforms is the immediacy with which updates are delivered. Earlier systems like instant messaging or chat allowed realtime messaging on a one-to-one or small group basis, but it's been harder to deliver those realtime messages to anyone in the world who wanted to receive them unless you had a lot of money, expertise and infrastructure.
Another barrier is that, while there are many different programs and clients that let you connect to Twitter or Facebook with your own applications, there haven't been any free and open options for delivering realtime messages to a large audience if you couldn't, or didn't want to, rely on those companies.
But recently, a few key pieces have fallen into place that make it inexpensive and relatively easy to add realtime messaging as an incremental upgrade to existing websites and web applications. This set of related technologies, which I'm calling the Pushbutton platform, will yield a broad new set of capabilities for users, publishers and developers on the web. Best of all, Pushbutton technologies are free, open and decentralized, meaning that the arrival of realtime on the web will not be owned or controlled by any single company.
Defining Pushbutton
The concept and potential of Pushbutton is a lot like Ajax — it's not a single technology or invention, it's a whole family of technologies, some of which have been in development or deployment for nearly a decade, that together enable this new realtime web. Pushbutton's foundation is built on these systems:
- Atom and RSS: The most common feed formats, for syndication on the web
- PubSubHubBub and RSSCloud: Powerful new "hubs" for distributing messages
- Web Hooks: Simple web services for receiving messages, rather than sending them
Pushbutton systems rely on the web's fundamental HTTP protocol for communication between these component parts. The architecture of Pushbutton message delivery is also simple to understand. Before Pushbutton, in today's systems, when you create a message (a blog post, tweet or other update) that's published in your RSS or Atom feed, every application or site that wants updates from you has to repeatedly request your feed to know when it's updated. You can optionally notify ("ping") some applications to tell them it's time to come collect your new updates, but this is time-consuming and resource-intensive on both sides, especially if you want to notify a lot of people.
In the best case, the system we have now is analogous to a person coming by your house and saying "Hey, there's a new edition of your favorite newspaper today. You should go get it." And then you have to go to the newspaper's printing plant to pick it up. In a Pushbutton web, that person is delivering each story to your house the moment it's complete.
That's because Pushbutton-enabled applications will improve upon the current state of affairs by proactively delivering not just the notification that there's a new message, but the content of the message itself. And instead of requiring all those applications to come to your site to read the update, it uses a hub server in the cloud to pass along the message directly to all the receivers that are interested in it.
- You, the Sender, create a message to be delivered via RSS or Atom
- Your application gives the messsage to one or more PubSubHubBub or RSSCloud hubs, which reside in the Cloud
- The PubSubHubBub or RSSCloud hubs deliver the message to any Receivers, the applications or sites that have requested updates from you
In this way, each time you create a new message, a large number of Receivers can consume that message in near realtime (usually less than a second) without a lot of complexity. This kind of messaging has been possible with custom-built or more obscure technologies in the past, but the Pushbutton ecosystem is a breakthrough for a few reasons:
- Sending messages just requires a minor change to an RSS or Atom feed, and a simple, well-defined update notification, instead of major changes to the application where you create your messages.
- Receiving messages is also very simple, only requiring a developer to handle incoming notifications of updates.
- Most of the system's complexity is handled in the hub servers, which are well-documented, implementable in a variety of programming languages, and built around open code that will likely attract a large developer community.
- Most of the scaling effort and expense happens at the hub level, and all current hubs are designed to run on inexpensive cloud systems like Google App Engine or Amazon's EC2.
- The software for Sending, Receiving or running a hub is free, open source and available on almost any platform.
- Messages sent on Pushbutton platforms are delivered via HTTP, which is familiar to any web developer and runs well on any hosting environment. All requests between the different layers of a Pushbutton system can be made as simple REST calls.
- Pushbutton technologies can be adopted incrementally, so that features can be added piecemeal on either the sender or receiver side, without requiring a wholesale upgrade to infrastructure or application architecture.
Who's Behind Pushbutton?
Pushbutton technologies have been created and advocated by some of the most credible and experienced developers of social web technologies. Here's a brief overview of the impressive pedigree of these components:
- PubSubHubBub was co-created by Brad Fitzpatrick and Brett Slatkin of Google. Brad was founder of LiveJournal, and created or co-created fundamental social web technologies like Memcached, OpenID and more.
- XML-RPC update pings, RSS and the RSS Cloud ideas were pioneered by Dave Winer, who has been actively developing open implementations of each of these technologies.
- Web Hooks have been evangelized by Jeff Lindsay, and have been deployed by a variety of different companies and platforms which all independently developed the technique.
In addition, Google has supported Brad and Brett's development of PubSubHubBub, and enabled it on the Google FeedBurner service. A number of smaller companies are deploying large parts of this infrastructure as well. In short, some of the best reputations in developing open web systems have made Pushbutton possible, from the biggest tech companies to the most steadfastly independent developers on the web.
Related Ideas and Prior Art
There are a lot of existing technologies that have influenced the creation and evolution of Pushbutton technologies; If you're familiar with any of these systems, you're probably already ahead of the curve in understanding part of what Pushbutton is trying to enable.
- Twitter Firehose, FriendFeed SUP, TypePad Update Stream: These realtime delivery systems offer up the content of their respective platforms as an unending stream that developers can consume and use in their applications. At the present time, they all have varying licenses and degrees of openness, and slightly different formats for delivering updates, but have proven the utility of the "sending" part of Pushbutton's realtime functionality.
- XMPP (Jabber), NNTP (Usenet), IRC: These older internet protocols all delivered various degrees of realtime messaging and distributed messaging capabilities, and can form a very useful base of experience for Pushbutton developers to learn from. In some cases, fundamental architectural choices about security, authentication or architecture were made when the Internet was less populated and less complex, making them inappropriate for today's applications. In all cases, these protocols are less-known by most contemporary web developers, and thus lack familiar toolkits and development resources, which make them quite challenging to deploy in common, inexpensive environments.
- TrackBack and Pingback: These systems for delivering updates between blogging systems were very effective in enabling rich distributed conversations in the early days of the blogosphere. These have declined in usefulness due to poor or missing implementations of authentication, which led to spam problems, and a general lack of understanding of their utility by a lot of newer bloggers. Pushbutton may offer an opportunity to restore some of the value of the idea behind these systems.
- Reverse HTTP may end up being a useful component of some Pushbutton deployments, as a complement or companion to Comet and related techniques.
What should we worry about?
- A format war? If you're familiar with the communities around technologies like feeds, you may know they have a deserved reputation for being contentious and even breaking into heated disputes over arcane details. I don't think that's likely to happen this time, because there are only one or two viable formats for each layer of the platform, and the creators of each part have shown some consistent good-faith efforts to promote interoperability where possible and peaceful coexistence where necessary. In the Ajax community, for example, the "X" in Ajax often stands for JSON instead of XML, but this hasn't hindered its broad adoption at all. I'm also willing to personally commit to try to prevent any kind of interpersonal conflict that would inhibit the adoption of Pushbutton technologies. Worry? No.
- Scaling issues? There will inevitably be some learning to do about how to scale the resource-intensive hub layer of a Pushbutton system. But because the hubs live on cloud systems that make enormous amounts of computing resources easily available, because the coders creating the reference implementations of the hub software have great experience making web-scale systems, and because it's relatively simple to introduce new hubs as needed, this will likely not be a gating factor for adoption of Pushbutton. Worry? No.
- Intellectual Property Concerns? I'm not a lawyer, and this isn't legal advice. But there has already been a great deal of interest in these systems, and it's likely that any bad actors who were interested in throwing their patent lawyers at this sort of system would probably already be suing people left and right. And the main players who are already involved have shown a consistent desire to make truly open systems that don't have IP encumbrances. Put simply, I think anybody smart enough to invent these kinds of technologies is smart enough to not want to look like jerks by suing somebody for using them. Worry? Probably not.
- Competition from centralized systems? Pushbutton technologies are not just free and open, they're decentralized, which is a serious threat to the "lobster trap" model of social software. We can expect serious competition from the centralized networks that are currently building these sorts of systems. If a threat arises to Pushbutton's adoption, this is the most likely source. Worry? Definitely.
- Bad user experience? One of the worst things we can do in making use of new technologies is to ignore the social, personal or even political implications of their use. Messages that are immediately delivered can't, by their nature, be erased from all the places they appear. The idea of permanently archiving these types of messages is unfamiliar to a lot of less technically-savvy users. And whenever we see something shiny and new, we have the temptation to use technology for technology's sake, whether or not we're solving a real problem or providing a real value. If Pushbutton gets a bad rap early on despite having tremendous potential, this will be why. Worry? Hell, yes.
Conclusion
I have tremendous excitement about the new realtime era of web applications. While I'm fundamentally an optimistic person, I have great skepticism when it comes to mindless hype about new technologies, so it's with a bit of reluctance that I indulge in some hype myself. But I think the Pushbutton web has the opportunity to give individuals and organizations with distinct and passionate voices the ability to be even more immediate and expressive on the web, and after ten years of publishing on the web, that's the part I love the most.
I have no doubt that some skeptics will say "Pushbutton is just PubSubHubBub by another name", just like they said "Ajax is XMLHttpRequest by another name", and if that's what the super-geeky guys want to believe, I'm fine with that. And I'm sure there will still be some significant technical details to resolve. But I think by giving the overall concept an approachable, understandable name and (hopefully!) an explanation that can be understood by anyone with an interest, it can catalyze interest in a whole new area of innovation on the web. And to be honest, when I see folks like Brad Fitzpatrick and Dave Winer hacking on the same set of problems, I can't help but think something interesting will come of it.
Over the next few days, I'll be outlining some of the opportunities around Pushbutton, espousing more of the philosophy that has the potential to imbue Pushbutton with a bit more meaning than most new web tech, and providing some simple explanations of how you can get started both learning about and taking advantage of these technologies. Most of all, I hope you'll offer your pointed criticisms, thoughtful critiques, detailed corrections and even better ideas. I'll be following the conversation here in the comments, across the blogosphere, and on Twitter using the tag #pshb.
NYC Cups
Last weekend, when I ordered a chocolate egg cream at Ray's Candy, it inexplicably came in a Wolfgang Puck coffee cup (click to view) instead of the usual Greek-design "We Are Happy to Serve You" cup so emblematic of the city. I thought little of it, figured he got some deal on cheap cups, finished my egg cream, and tossed the cup away.
Last summer's egg cream at Ray's:
Remarkably, the next day, City Room solved the mystery, telling the story behind the recent proliferation of random coffee cups of New York. Jennifer 8. Lee explains, "much of the eclectic assortment of cups are part of a lively underground market of what are called 'misprints'....they are overruns, discontinued prints, leftovers from promotions, or the results of cup-using vendors who go bankrupt, leaving the manufacturer with unwanted cups."
photo: Angela Jimenez for The New York Times
Aside from Wolfgang Puck, the random cups advertise banks, football stadiums, soft drinks, and pharmaceuticals. Aside from my feelings about ubiquitous advertising, I am now left to worry that the iconic "We Are Happy to Serve You" cup is about to vanish from the city.
I am not alone. Some years ago, an artist named Rodger Stevens had the same concern. As the Times wrote in 2005, "Horrified, Mr. Stevens began assiduously collecting--or, more precisely, not discarding--as many different cups as he could find. Even after realizing that his panic had been premature, he continued adding to his collection. Today he has about 100 cups..."
photo: Angela Jimenez for The New York Times
In that article, Mr. Stevens had some rather eloquent things to say about the cup, so I will let him say them:
"These little cups are its distinctive birthmarks. They are all little bits of proof that this is New York and not someplace else."
Having them replaced by upscale coffee shop logos (his fear at the time) is "something akin to plastic surgery, an eradication of blemishes that might denote age or a certain, lower status."
photo: Angela Jimenez for The New York Times
The Times article also tell us, that the cup's "design dates to the mid-1960's, when the Sherri Cup Company of Kensington, Conn., designed it to appeal to the hundreds of Greek coffee shops then operating in the city. The cup was named Anthora, a muddled version of Amphora, the Greek word for the ancient jars depicted in its design."
The design changed over time, but stayed identifiable. Says the 2005 article, "Greek motifs continue to adorn up to 40 percent of 10-ounce cardboard cups in New York." But that was then. Today, we are besieged by "misprint" cups. In the near future, will the Anthora cup only come in ceramic? Or as coin purses?
As Anthora cups disappear from the streets of New York, you can still buy the cup in bulk here. It might be time to stock up.
July 23, 2009
A Dumb Speech for Dumb People.
How I spent my summer vacation: Dr. Henry Louis Gates’ mugshot
As the final questioner at last night’s press conference in support of Barack Obama’s health care plan, The Chicago Sun-Times‘ Lynn Sweet asked the President for his thoughts on the recent arrest of Harvard University’s Dr. Henry Louis “Skip” Gates, above. As certainly anyone at all knows by now, Dr. Gates, a few days earlier, had suffered the indignity of being arrested for the crime of being in his own home, in a case now widely being seen as one of so-called “racial profiling.”
President Obama, right, gave a nice, reasonable answer, of the kind at which he is, arguably, flawless. He cracked a joke or two. He appealed to a sense of fairness that the blindingly white press pool, no doubt, possesses as fair and balanced journalists. He said he didn’t know “what role race played” in Gates’ mistreatment, but then cited “a long history in this country of African Americans and Latinos being stopped by law enforcement disproportionately,” adding, for certainty. “That’s just a fact.”
He said that “the Cambridge Police acted stupidly,” that quote being the one which, subsequently, was the most widely reproduced, and, to this writer, the one that came the closest to expressing any sort of a feeling or passion about the incident on his part.
What he did not say, however, or speak to, was the irony of what I had immediately noticed, soon as word of Gates’ arrest hit the wires: The scholar’s detainment had occurred mere hours before Obama gave his address, right, at the NAACP’s 100th anniversary convention. There, in the grand ballroom of the Hilton Hotel in New york City, the nation’s first Black president had hailed the organization’s history and astounding struggle, efforts which, in his own words, had directly led to his being “here tonight as the 44th President of the United States of America.”
It was a dumb speech, made to a bunch of dumb people. By this, I don’t mean that Obama is dumb, or that his NAACP benefit audience is, either. What I mean is that it seems impossible for Barack Obama to address a large crowd of Black people as equals, or even, really, as constituents. As Jesse Jackson said a year ago when he thought his mic was off, I often feel like Obama is talking down to Black audiences. For example, whenever he speaks to a lot of us at once, the form and content of his language is not detailed, procedural, or strategic, but allusive, poetic, and folksy.
It’s almost like he slips into the semantic-textual equivalent of that detestable, quasi-Southern Black preacher’s accent Hillary Clinton would employ at African-American churches during her campaign. To Obama, filching a familiar term he used in his NAACP speech, we appear to strike him as one gigantic, nationwide amen corner. But when he “goes to church,” as he does at the end of his NAACP speech, shouting proclamations to the excited cheers of the audience, like there was an organ playing hot syncopations nearby, it’s a brassy, rhythmless mess, without the succulent gasps, holds, and shouts that encircle the Black religious experience when choreographed by, well, Jackson, or Obama’s once Obi-Wan/now Darth, Jeremiah Wright.
Even Def Jam mogul Russell Simmons, right—perhaps, in part, because he’s reportedly BFFing the sleazy Republican National Committee chair, Michael Steele—said July 24, on Twitter,
The speech @ naacp was more inspiring if he as a preacher. But the president could tell us about sending our kids to college. Minister farakahn or michael steele could give us the lift yourself rap (we need that too) where’s the special programs for the poor? I know the President can only do so much. He’s doing a lot, But I was not as happy as some blacks with the conservative speech
Actually, Russell is right: When the president shows up, he brings, by default, the Big Guns. They’re called policy. But Obama doesn’t deliver policy when he talks to Black people, either because he feels we want more chu’ch, or perhaps because anything that could really work for Black people—a Black Marshall Plan, say—would not only disastrously drain “white resources”—what they, collectively, perceive to be “theirs”—but would be political hara-kiri. As such, by necessity, help for Black people must be filtered through white people, so it does not appear that the president has crafted any sort of “special treatment” for the members of his own racial group.
He’s said as much. Carefully consider the language of this response, below, from his June 23rd press conference. Keep in mind that Black economic indicators during good periods are normally what white people are generally experiencing now.
Q: Mr. President, people are criticizing this road to recovery plan. Specifically, there are reports in The Washington Post that say that the African America unemployment rate will go to 20 percent by the end of this year. And then you had your Chairman of Economic Advisers say the target intervention may come next year if nothing changes. Why not target intervention now to stop the bloodletting in the black unemployment rate?
THE PRESIDENT: Look, first of all, we know that the African American unemployment rate, the Latino unemployment rate, are consistently higher than the national average. And so, if the economy as a whole is doing poorly, then you know that the African American community is going to be doing poorly, and they’re going to be hit even harder. And the best thing that I can do for the African American community or the Latino community or the Asian community, whatever community, is to get the economy as a whole moving. If I don’t — hold on one second, let me answer the question — if I don’t do that, then I’m not going to be able to help anybody. So that’s priority number one.
It is true that in certain inner-city communities, the unemployment rate is — was already sky high even before this recession. The ladders available for people to enter into the job market are even worse. And so we are interested in looking at proven programs that help people on a pathway to jobs.
There was a reason why right before Father’s Day I went to a program here locally in Washington called Year Up, which has a proven track record of taking young, mostly minority people, some of whom have graduated from high school, some maybe who’ve just gotten their GED, and trained them on computers and provide them other technical skills, but also train them on how to carry themselves in an office, how to write an e-mail — some of the social skills that will allow them to be more employable. They’ve got a terrific placement rate after this one-year program. If there are ways that we can potentially duplicate some of those programs, then we’re going to do so.
So part of what we want to do is to find tools that will give people more opportunity, but the most important thing I can do is to lift the economy overall. And that’s what my strategy is focused on.
Most of all, though, as the nation’s first Black president, but one who grew up with a white mother, one often gets the sense that Obama’s internal race narrative is psychically approved, in advance, by white people.
Of course, there actually is no need for such a vetting. As a person who, his entire life, as he notes in his 1995 memoir, Dreams from My Father, right, “learned to slip back and forth between my Black and white worlds,” Obama early acquired a critical survival technique: “People were satisfied so long as you were courteous and smiled and made no sudden moves. They were more than satisfied; they were relieved — such a pleasant surprise to find a well-mannered young black man who didn’t seem angry all the time.” This perfectly describes the tenor of his speeches.
For example, am I the only journalist who noticed that, in his NAACP address, Obama did not once say the word racism?
Does this make sense? I mean, isn’t racism what the NAACP has been fighting against for the past century? If President Obama addressed the Anti-Defamation League, would he mention “anti-Semitism,” or “cancer,” if he was speaking to the Cancer Society?
During his NAACP talk, Obama observed that “the pain of discrimination is still felt in America…by African American women paid less for doing the same work as colleagues of a different color and a different gender.”
Huh? A question for Black people: Have you ever been around Black folk who, when saying “White people” in proximity to some, sound those words out in a faint stage whisper—”White People!“—while exaggerating their facial expressions to compensate for the soft volume? Perhaps you do this. Nearing 2010, talking about “colleagues of a different color and a different gender” is the gifted orator’s equivalent of doing exactly that.
Of course, though, the reason Obama doesn’t talk about racism is because, if you say it, you have to say what it is when asked. Or you have to lie. As an esteemed mentor has often said to me, “You can’t talk about racism with out doing two things, right off the bat: Embarrassing white people, and offending Black people. You can’t do it if you’re going to tell the truth.” When asked what racism is, I say two words: White supremacy. For some reason, a lot of white people go nuts when you do that, or, seemingly, try not to.
So, why bother? Black people don’t need him to say it, for the most part, because, to a great extent, they’re just glad to see him in office, looking sharp and sounding smart. I wrote about this almost exactly a year ago, here, on MEDIA ASSASSIN, in “The Speech Barack Obama Could Have Given to White Fathers If He Wasn’t So Busy Talking Down to Black People.” Much as his 2008 Father’s Day speech did at Apostolic Church of God in Chicago, above, major parts of his NAACP keynote focused on telling Black people how to raise their kids. Has Obama ever made this speech before white parents? (He definitely has never said the version in my article.) I mean, given Obama’s own admission about his dad—that, as a child, he “probably was shaped more by his absence than his presence”—this oft-repeated advice comes off almost like a form of passive aggression..
In the end, though, Obama didn’t have to speak about racism, perhaps. One hundred and eighty-five miles away from the Hilton, having been pointed out by some otherwise nondescript white woman passing through his neighborhood, the man who is arguably America’s most prominent African American professor was sitting in a cell, lighting the path into the NAACP’s second century.
Let's Get Engaged: Lane Becker on the new customer service landscape
Lane Becker, the president and co-founder of GetSatisfaction came to Yahoo!'s Sunnyvale headquarters this week, accompanied by Amy Muller, Chief Community Officer, and Wendy Lea, GetSatisfaction's CEO. Lane's entertaining presentation introduced Yahoos from around the company to some new ideas about supporting and engaging our customers and users.
According to their website, Get Satisfaction enables "customer communities for products and organizations" -- it's a platform and a destination for community conversations, a place to gather ideas and feedback, cut down on repetitive support costs, and build loyalty and trust between products/brands/companies, and the people who interact and do business with them.
Zappos.com is a Get Satisfaction poster child for this new model of customer engagement. Lane described Zappos as a "customer service company that happens to sell shoes," and he was full of interesting anecdotes about how Zappos wins the hearts and minds of online shoppers. The next day, we read about Amazon's acquisition of Zappos, and realized that the "concierge" model of customer support had captured the imagination of Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos as well.
Here's a quick walk through Lane's talk, with thanks to Slideshare.
Lets Get Engaged 072209View more documents from Lane Becker.
Havi Hoffman
Yahoo! Developer Network
Facebook = lobster trap
I love a good analogy:
Facebook is basically designed like a lobster trap with your friends as bait.
(via migurski)
Tags: Facebook
Method Man Talks Joint Album W/ Ghostface & Raekwon, "It's In Discussion Right Now" [Video]
Wu-Tang Clan's Method Man recently revealed plans to make a collaboration project alongside Raekwon and Ghostface Killah.
[Visit SOHH.com for more information]
Catch Mark Buehrle in person!
Today, Chicago White Sox pitcher Mark Buehrle threw only the 18th perfect game in the history of baseball. While that feat will have collectors rushing to eBay hoping to snatch up Buehrle’s best rookie cards and certified autographs, some might be in for a bit of a surprise.
Mark Buehrle, who already had a no-hitter on his resume, doesn’t have many certified autographs. Furthermore, his most popular rookie card comes from Bowman but does not feature a certified autograph, something collectors have become accustomed to and perhaps even spoiled by.
Buehrle, 30, is considered one of the game’s most generous and prolific autograph signers. You can find many success stories online from collectors who have had luck getting Mark to sign in person or through the mail. Now if being labeled an Autograph Hound is not something you’d like, Buehrle’s best rookie card is selling for reasonable prices, unless you want a graded Gem Mint copy.
The-Dream Calls It Quits, "I'd Rather Kill The-Dream Than Somebody Else Kill Me" [Video]
Hitmaker The-Dream has announced his retirement from making albums and explained why his next album will be his last.
[Visit SOHH.com for more information]
Serious Salsa: Watermelon Pico de Gallo
Note: You may know Lisa Fain as the Homesick Texan. She'll be joining us each week this summer with a refreshing salsa recipe for you to try. ¡Andale!
"Ladies and gentlemen, it’s watermelon time!"
During the warm-weather months, I have a friend who makes this proclamation every afternoon. At the beginning of the summer, one finds it charming. But as we get deeper into the warm-weather season, it's easy to get annoyed by his daily announcement.
That is, annoyed only until you realize he’s right—it is watermelon time!
I’m a latecomer to watermelon love. Sure, no summer outdoor feast is complete without big wedges of watermelon piled high on the picnic table. But I can’t eat these because I’m something of a mess, and I know that more watermelon will end up on my clothes and on my face than in my mouth. And really, I’m not that big of a fan, as its flavor doesn’t seem to go beyond simple sweetness.
One day, however, I was introduced to the concept of savory watermelon. And I was hooked.
Watermelon salad—usually paired with salty feta or cotija cheese—has become quite popular in recent years, and for good reason. The pairing of the salt with the sweet gives the watermelon a bit of flavor while maintaining its cool and refreshing nature. I love it.
To celebrate my newfound watermelon love, I find myself making watermelon pico de gallo, using the watermelon as a stand-in for tomatoes, which aren’t quite ripe here in the Northeast. I mix it up with all the pico de gallo usual suspects: red onions, Serrano chiles and cilantro. I also like to throw in some radishes for a crisp, sharp bite. I add plenty of salt and black pepper, and have been known to sprinkle some cotija cheese on top as well.
But my latest addition to my watermelon pico de gallo is ham. Is it strange to add meat to salsa? Perhaps. But is it delicious? Yes, it most definitely is.This salsa perks up shrimp, freshens fish tacos, and can even be eaten straight from the bowl with a spoon. If you can find watermelon with seeds, I would use that, even though it’s a bit more work. I’m of the old-fashioned conviction that watermelon with seeds tastes better. That said, if you can only find seedless watermelon, your salsa will definitely not suffer.
And I bet after you give this pico de gallo a try, you, too will be saying, “Ladies and gentlemen, it’s watermelon time!”
Watermelon Pico de Gallo
Ingredients:
2 cups of diced watermelon
2 radishes, finely diced
1/4 cup diced red onion (about 1/2 of a small red onion)
1 Serrano pepper, diced
2 slices of ham, cut into small pieces (optional)
1/4 cup of cilantro, minced
Juice from one half of a lime
Salt and black pepper to tasteProcedure:
Toss all ingredients together, and let sit for half an hour in the refrigerator.
Steroid users as sports pioneers
Baseball historian Bill James makes a compelling argument that steroids will eventually become an accepted aspect of sports (and society as a whole) and that baseball players who are now more or less banned from entering the Hall of Fame (though not officially) will eventually be elected to Cooperstown.
If we look into the future, then, we can reliably foresee a time in which everybody is going to be using steroids or their pharmaceutical descendants. We will learn to control the health risks of these drugs, or we will develop alternatives to them. Once that happens, people will start living to age 200 or 300 or 1,000, and doctors will begin routinely prescribing drugs to help you live to be 200 or 300 or 1,000. If you look into the future 40 or 50 years, I think it is quite likely that every citizen will routinely take anti-aging pills every day.
How, then, are those people of the future -- who are taking steroids every day -- going to look back on baseball players who used steroids? They're going to look back on them as pioneers. They're going to look back at it and say "So what?"
(via hello typepad)
Tags: baseball Bill James sports steroids
You Are There
First broadcast on the radio in 1947, You Are There presented historic events as they would have been reported by modern news broadcasters. In 1953, the program jumped to television with Walter Cronkite as the host, who also hosted a brief revival of the show in the 70s.
The series also featured various key events in American and world history, portrayed in dramatic recreations, with one addition -- CBS News reporters, in modern-day suits, would report on the action and interview the characters. Each episode would begin with the characters setting the scene. Cronkite, from his anchor desk in New York, would give a few words on what was about to happen. An announcer would then give the date and the event, followed by a bold, "You Are There!"
Cronkite would then return to describe the event and its characters more in detail, before throwing it to the event, saying, "All things are as they were then, except... You Are There."
At the end of the program, after Cronkite summarizes what happened in the preceding event, he reminded viewers, "What sort of day was it? A day like all days, filled with those events that alter and illuminate our times... and you were there."
Here's a clip from an episode from the 70s version of the show about the siege of the Alamo. Cronkite reports and Fred Gwynne (Herman Munster) plays Davy Crockett.
What a fantastic idea for a show...I'd love to see a contemporary version of this. Well, not too contemporary; watching a CNBC-style presentation of the 1929 stock market crash wouldn't really be that fun.
Tags: history TV video Walter Cronkite You Are There
Quote: Jim Breuer on Being a Mets Fan
Comedian and well-known Mets fan Jim Breuer had the following to say about being a Mets fan this morning, while appearing as a guest on WMMR in Philadelphia:
“They suck. It’s like being in love with an alcoholic. It’s like, you constantly defend her, and people are like, ‘Dude, your alcoholic friend is a mess,’ and you’re like, ‘Nah, you don’t know her like I do.’”
To listen to Breuer’s comments, go to Hugging Harold Reynolds.
Untitled
Let’s briefly review the 2nd Avenue Subway’s history:
- Initial Proposal: 1929! Obviously, derailed by the First Great Depression
- Digging Commences: 1972. Three years later, the city received a “DROP DEAD [STOP]” telegram from then-POTUS Gerald Ford
- Digging Starts Again: April, 2007. By mid-August, New York would learn that its position as the center of a global financial shitgyre could not hold.
The lesson here is that when people start working on the 2nd Avenue Subway in earnest, sell everything and hole up at your upstate compound for a few years, because the City is fucked.
On the flipside, when the city faces reality on the SAS, that’s like a “Red Sky at Night, Urbanite’s Delight” type of thing:
- 1939: Line officially postponed indefinitely, relegated to “proposed” status. Also, take your suspender barrel down to the furriers’ for cold storage, First Great Depression over.
- 1945: Plan revised, big chunk canceled. America only industrialized country not left in ruin from WWII, presides over unprecedented global economic expansion, center of global trade moves to New York City.
You may have noticed that the future of the line is in doubt again, and the MTA has already pushed back the completion date of Phase I substantially, so get the champagne chilling, everything should be coming up NEW YORK!
NPR: I am available for comment on your “uncommon economic indicators” program any time provided you can meet my modest honorarium needs (hint: it involves Carl Kasell leaving a humorous outgoing message on my voicemail).
In-Season PECOTAs
In case you haven’t yet noticed, a trip to team depth charts and individual PECOTA cards now features what is commonly referred to as in-season projection updates. A fantastically useful addition to the site, the updated PECOTAs incorporate data accrued this season and, through a nifty little process that will be outlined below, blend with the pre-season projection in order to inform on expectations for a player moving forward. Keep in mind when reading about the in-season update process that the actual PECOTA cards for individual players have not been altered save for a brief table beneath the player’s picture with the update itself; the vast majority of the original card has remained intact.
Clay Davenport utilizes his translations to make the updates, and instead of providing you with a laundry list of random steps, let’s instead discuss the new system through an example… say, Joe Mauer, since we recently discussed his chances at hitting .400 (score +1 for Seidman in the self-pimping column!).
Prior to the season, Mauer had a weighted mean projection of .307/.388/.436, based on aspects such as his track record, his age, expected park factors for the league, expected league performance, and the list goes on. The first step to providing his in-season projection involves the retranslation of his pre-season PECOTA to the external factors inherent in 2009. For instance, partly due to Minnesota running a park factor of 1.06 as opposed to the expected 0.98, and partly due to the current offensive levels of the junior circuit, Mauer’s retranslation of the original PECOTA jumps to .313/.402/.457; as in, if we expected Minnesota to boast that specific park factor entering the season, Mauer’s weighted mean would have looked like the aforementioned triple-slash line, not the original line atop this paragraph.
The next step involves translating Mauer’s 2006-09 seasons relative to the 2009 specifications, or, in other words, what his lines in years past would have looked like had they sported similar leaguewide offensive levels and park factors. The translated numbers from 2006-09 are then weighted, decreasing back by one-half each season; 2009=1, 2008=0.5, 2007=0.25, 2006=0.125.
When the weights were run on the translated numbers, a weighted average of .339/.426/.538 results, which then has to be blended with the pre-season projection. The Twins had played 94 games, which accounts for 58 percent of their season, so the weighting would be 0.58*translated weighted average + 0.42*original but translated PECOTA. The end result is a .328/.416/.504 line. Based on what we have seen this year as well as what PECOTA saw in making the original projection, Mauer should hit right around .328/.416/.504 the rest of the season. The way it is set up, the more games played this season, the less weight the original PECOTA carries. From there, raw totals are derived from the playing time estimates in the updated PFM.
So, if you’re ever curious about what a player is projected to do from here on out, simply take a trip to the team depth charts or to his individual PECOTA page. In case anyone isn’t sure where to find it, here is a link to Joe Mauer’s page:
http://www.baseballprospectus.com/pecota/mauerjo01.php
Beneath his picture is a big, blue bolded link titled Projected Playing Time. Beneath that is a short, 3-line or so table with his playing time percentage and rates/raw totals projected from here on out. This is where it can be found on the individual cards. Relative to the team depth charts, click on the link for Projected Playing Time and you will be transported to the team page, with playing time estimates and projections from here on out.
Status Report: Sands Street Bike Path Ready Next Week
You're not really supposed to do this yet, but next week the bridge approach on Sands Street should officially open.
There's a fresh coat of asphalt on the Sands Street bike path, and guys on the construction crew say this long-awaited approach to the Brooklyn side of the Manhattan Bridge should officially open for riding next week. Still to come: pavement markings and fencing.
Streetsblog's offices are just a short walk away on Water Street, and I figure it's not often that you get to show a piece of heavy duty bike infrastructure round into form, so here are a few more pictures showing the progress since last week. To appreciate how much this project will improve commutes for cyclists, check out the "before" pictures from last September.
The crew works on the section between Navy Street and Gold Street.
This signal, at the intersection of Sands and Gold, is for cyclists.
This is the barrier separating the bike path from auto traffic. The silver markings are there to guide installation of a fence.
‘New York Times’: We’re Doing Better Than Yahoo!
The Times, on their conference call this morning: we’re doing better than Yahoo, because we had (very slightly!) less advertising revenue decline this quarter! Um. You really wanna compare yourself like that? The Times had total revenue of $584.5 million this quarter (down 20% or so, by the way); Yahoo had revenues of $1.573 billion.
A shocking new bunny emotion
We all know there is immense and ample evidence of bunny disapproval. And now, there is the look of bunnular shock that can be added to their repetoire:
Ruh-Roh!
By the way, Sener-Inner Connie L. says bun “Louie” likes to wear “carrot lipstick.”
Posted in Uncategorized Tagged: Bunnies
What's On Earth Tonight?
Strange Maps has a map of What's On Earth Tonight, basically a TV Guide for the Milky Way. The map is not that big yet because TV signals have only been sent out from Earth since the late 1920s.
The first tv images of World War II are about to hit Aldebaran star system, 65 light years [ly] away. If there's anybody out there alive and with eyes to see it, the barrage of actual and dramatised footage of WW2 will keep them shocked and/or entertained for decades to come. Which is just as well, for they'll have to wait quite a few years to catch the first episodes of such seminal series as The Twilight Zone and Bonanza (both 1959), just about now hitting the (putative) extraterrestrial biological entities of the Mu Arae area (appr. 50 ly). The Cosby Show, Miami Vice and Night Court (all 1984) should be all the rage on Fomalhaut (25 ly). Meanwhile, the sentient, tv-watching creatures near Alpha Centauri (4.4 ly), our closest extrasolar star, are just recovering from the infamous "wardrobe malfunction" during Janet Jackson and Justin Timberlake's halftime show during the 2004 Superbowl.
See also the opening scene from Contact.
Tags: contact maps movies TV
Off to Comic-Con; Have Some Links
Things have been quiet here this week and will be till Sunday because I’m working at Comic-Con, San Diego’s nerdy popular culture explosion at the downtown convention center. If you’re in San Diego and going to CC, come say hi to me at The Guild booth #4417, where I’ll be helping out selling The Guild DVDs and t-shirts. In the meantime, catch up on stuff I’ve been posting elsewhere.
- At Lifehacker earlier this month I published How to Crack a Wi-Fi Network’s WEP Password with BackTrack and then the follow-up, WEP Cracking Redux: Beyond the Command Line. Both these articles got a huge response, but don’t worry, I’m not going blackhat: it was all proof-of-concept.
- Also at Lifehacker: Gmail Tasks Keeps It (Too) Simple. Very exciting news that Google is moving into to-do lists, but they need to take it up a few notches.
- Inspired by the reader response to the Gmail Tasks piece, over at the Pelotonics blog PeloLife, I posted Simplicity vs. Features: Crafting the Perfect Task Manager.
- How to Troubleshoot a Flaky Internet Connection [Lifehacker]: This is everything I know about getting back online when you get knocked off.
- Must-Have Google Search Tricks [Work Smarter at HarvardBusiness.org]
- Save Hours of Typing Time with Text Expansion [Work Smarter at HarvardBusiness.org]
- Extreme Ways to Shorten and Reduce Meetings [Work Smarter at HarvardBusiness.org]
Back next week–hope to see you at Comic-Con! If not, keep an eye on what’s going on there at io9.
Hacking The Planet
The American Meteorological Society, Climate engineering research gets green light, Rich Harvard, Poor Harvard, Time.com Poll: Now that Walter Cronkite has passed on, who is America’s most trusted newscaster?, Online Poll: Jon Stewart Is America’s Most Trusted Newsman, Auto-Tune the News #5: lettuce regulation. American blessings., Face.com Brings Facial Recognition To Facebook Photos, Totally Looks Like.com, Architectural Craziness Redux: Meet Manhattan Airport!, (via Kottke)
"Why Did you Click Through?"
Bill James on Steroids, a must read for baseball, math, or history nerds. If we look into the future, then, we can reliably foresee a time in which everybody is going to be using steroids or their pharmaceutical descendants. We will learn to control the health risks of these drugs, or we will develop alternatives to them... How, then, are those people of the future—who are taking steroids every day—going to look back on baseball players who used steroids? They’re going to look back on them as pioneers. They’re going to look back at it and say “So what?” Bonus! Last night I did some guest blogging on sippey.com, although the good post was his. Meanwhile, Michael used a meta post, to entice comment-blogging by other friends.
This is a yurt I made out of office supplies... The snowy mountains in the distance were made by the judicious draping of tea towels.
DEALFEED: Bar Artisanal
The Restaurant: Bar Artisanal
The Deal: Summer Cocktail Hour. Half off beer and cocktails.
When/Where: Monday through Friday, 3p.m. to 6p.m. and 10p.m. to 1a.m.; 268 W. Broadway, 212-925-1600.
Today’s Headlines
More headlines at Streetsblog Capitol Hill
- Feds: MTA Timetable on 2nd Ave Subway Too Optimistic (News, City Room, AMNY, 2nd Ave Sagas)
- Oberstar on Raising the Gas Tax: "Congress Decides, Not the Administration" (PBS)
- Shame on Bloomberg: Mayor's SUVs Seen Idling Around Town (AP, News)
- The Times Keeps Up the Commentary on Distracted Driving
- More Cities Creating Guidelines to Design Livable Streets (Planetizen)
- Police Chase Mayhem in Washington Heights (News, NYT)
- One American Town Makes the Copenhagenize Top Bike-Friendly Cities List (via Streetsblog.net)
- Will There Ever Be a Way to Bike or Walk Across the Verrazano? (Examiner)
- Q: Who Is Mark Huijgan? A: A Bike Thief's Worst Nightmare (Post)
- Here's One Way to Eliminate Parking in Manhattan (News)
Right a Sinking Ship
There comes a time in a franchise's history, when everything has been twisted and stretched and pained for an extended period of time, that one has to say, it's time to start over. Right now, there are several things contributing to the mess over in Citi Field. One, is the rash of injuries. Two is Tony Bernazard, the 53 year-old Mets EXECUTIVE who's paid bundles more than you are, but doesn't get canned even after challenging a bunch of teenagers to a fight - shirtless, mind you. Three, the bumbling GM running the show. He's not helping matters. And what makes things worse, what makes things futile even (for Mets fans at least) is Jeff Wilpon's refusal to fire Tony Bernazard or Omar Minaya - an even bigger indictment to the hopeless forecast this franchise faces. In my own humble opinion, the only way to fix this is to decapitate power and rebuild, because shit like this - incidents involving top-dogs that are so ridiculous they are barely believable - will continue to happen again and again and again until something is done to curb it.
For whatever reason (I can give one, but people may think even less of me, if that's possible), Omar Minaya has managed to hang around loooooooooooong after his welcome has worn. He's a bad General Manager. Say it with me - he's a bad General Manager. He's a bad General Manager. What's he done to secure this team for the long haul? You can crow all you want about the Johan Santana trade, but be honest with yourself - the deal fell into his lap, because all other bidders with better talent dropped out. The farm system is dried up. The prospects pipeline is empty.
So why do fans continue to defend Minaya, what sparks this strange loyalty? Is it because they feel like there is no hope? Is it because Minaya's positive personnel moves overshadow and veil the bad ones he's made? Is it because - gasp - Minaya has been a God-send compared to the 'tard who held the job before him? I think it's all of the above. When you're slowly being beaten down mentally, from the 2006 NLCS, to the 7 game collapse of '07, to the bullpen implosion last season, I'm sure it's inevitable to develop a minor Stockholm Syndrome with your "captors".
Boston is the perfect example. Prior to 2002, this large market team was stocked with underachieving primadonnas, washed-up vets, bad contracts and a land-locked Ace of all Aces. At the helm was a moron who couldn't take a shit with getting it on his shoes. Fans didn't know any different. But a change came through, and turned the team, its existence, and its mentality upside down, in a good way. True, the Red Sox changed ownership, and the new ownership assembled a team of executives and players that would eventually lead a legion of Massholes back to the promised land (even if that charge did cause me to hemorrhage from the eyeballs). But screw ownership change; Jeff Wilpon seems like a smart guy (when not investing cash, of course). He has the ability to implode this faulty tower he's constructed. Start from scratch, make smart free agent moves, suck it up for a few years, coddle the farm system. It can be done. It's happened many times before.
When there's bad blood flowing through a team, its management, and its players, the only way to fix the problem is to drain it. Oh, and not challenging 18 year-old players to fistfights and keeping a level-head helps too, of course.
Yurt.
This is a yurt I made out of office supplies. It is modeled on this real yurt here. It was made for the occasion of Belgian Waffling's now annual tradition of the glorious Internet village fête.
Mixed mediaIndex cards, printer paper, Post-Its, coffee stirrer, chopped-up file folder, felt-tip pen
Detail viewThe snowy mountains in the distance were made by the judicious draping of tea towels. Originally I'd made a slightly less wintry steppe setting by covering my office desk with manila folders but the photos I took there failed to show off the exquisite workmanship to my full satisfaction.
NYTimes.com Editors Don't Give a Damn About Web Traffic [Media]
The Observer's Gillian Reagan wrote a piece on how the content is managed on at NYTimes.com. Reagan spoke to the Times executives who manage the paper's website, two guys whose view of the web is, well, interesting.
The aforementioned executives are Times deputy managing editor Jonathan Landman and associate managing editor/NYTimes.com's digital news editor Jim Roberts. Here's part of what they told Reagan about the process that goes into putting together the stories featured on the Times home page.
Both Mr. Landman and Mr. Roberts say that Web stats have no bearing on what they choose to put on the front page of the newspaper or the home page of the site. "In terms of minute-to-minute news decisions, I think that would pretty much drive me crazy," Mr. Roberts said.
"You know, I would say if I had more time I would probably try to investigate more in what our readers are doing," Mr. Roberts said. "I guess I would rather know some broad trends, than some specific minute to minute thing," like whether readers are more interested in science news or fashion reports.
"Or if a profile of someone that I thought was a really really well written piece, if it sort of got miserable traffic, I would like to know about it and at least like to think about why that was the case, whether there was a message to be sent there," Mr. Roberts said.
Now look, we understand the need to create a varied and eclectic array of stories for readers to choose from on any website's homepage, especially that of a newspaper, but how can they completely ignore traffic stats altogether? I mean, really? Isn't that incredibly, oh, I don't know, dumb?!
How The Times Home Page Gets Made [Observer]
July 22, 2009
innonate: Like your favorite bar in the East Village, Twitter...
Like your favorite bar in the East Village, Twitter sucks now that it’s popular.
That’s the feeling I’ve had for sometime, and — as it turns out — founder @ev and investor @fredwilson agree… at least statistically.
Today, I used TweetStats to look at the historical Twittering of Fred Wilson, Ev Williams, @caro, @garyvee, @evbart, and myself. To no suprise, when averaged together (see this spreadsheet), we’ve all been Twittering a little less since it’s been “popular” (see the graph above, with Compete.com traffic data.
While my data sample might make a statistician squirm, it’s enough for me. If you want more data in there, head to TweetStats, get your data, and add it to my spreadsheet. It’s an open project here.
What he said.
justin hall had it right
put time into whatever it is you like to do, and put that up on the web.
write about yourself, your hobbies, your passions, your politics, your community
whatever turns you on
because if you can be excited about them offline, and somehow transmit that enthusiasm online, or that depth of emotion over the wires
people will find it and stay for it and check back in on it,
especially if they think it's going to changeJustin Hall, what you need to make a responded site
I've been reading Scott Rosenberg's book Say Everything and going on a bit of a nostalgia trip. And while everything is still mostly Carl's fault, the great stuff that's happening in social media, blogs, etc., traces back to what Justin Hall said back in 1996.
The New NPR.org on You Tube
This is a completely genius promotional video for the coming relaunch of NPR.org featuring the voice — and face! — of their marquee broadcaster Scott Simon experiencing the redesigned site for the first time. There’s nothing revolutionary in these three minutes and six seconds, but the simple, elegant use of their core storytelling strengths combined with the demonstrative power of the screencast format is just really, really smart. It’s a rare example of an ‘old media brand’ doing something genuinely surprising in a new medium.
Features of 4.3: Entry Asset Manager
On Monday, Beau posted about our effort to update the docs for MT 4.3. Today I'm coming to you with information on one of our new features — the entry asset manager.
An Easier Way
Up until now, the only way to associate an image with an entry was to place it in the entry body. Upon save, Movable Type would write that association to the database. In order to do this, there a form tag was placed around the image (that was stripped out when you published), which was confusing to many. In 4.3, we decided to make this relationship clearer and easier to manage.
As you can see to your right, every image associated with this entry is listed in a new sidebar widget on the edit entry page. Hovering over the image shows you a thumbnail. Clicking on 'Add New' in the widget only adds the image to the list, not the entry body. This means you can now use the mt:EntryAssets tag to access assets without inserting them into the entry body.
Of course, you can still add images to the entry body, but now they won't have that ugly form tag. Not only is this easier for beginners, but it has the side effect of greatly improved performance of the rich text editor (RTE) in modern browsers. Resizing and moving photos inside the RTE is now a breeze in browsers like Firefox.
So What Can I Do With It? Slideshows
Oftentimes you want to create a slideshow inside of an entry, but that would mean pasting all of the code in the entry body. Template experts could handle it, but it was nearly impossible to explain this process to a client. Now a writer just needs to write their post, select the photos they want to use in the asset manager, and click save. They do the writing, and the developer does the developing.
After the jump, I've provided some Javascript that will create a very simple slideshow. It's not using any new tags, but it's an example of how you can cleanly separate code and content.
Slideshow Code
This code is not polished (nor is it meant to be), but it illustrates the functionality clearly. For production, you'd make a true Javascript function for all of this — or, even better, build it in about 1/4 of the number of lines using jQuery — and provide some CSS styles.
To start, just above your entry body, place the following line of html:
<div id="entry-gallery"></div>Then, anywhere below that, add the following block of Javascript. It will create an array of your entry assets, then build out the HTML elements using the DOM. Finally, there is a function that will make the previous and next links load a new image in the img tag (and loop to the front or back, when necessary).
<script type="text/javascript"> var entryAssets = new Array(<mt:EntryAssets>'<mt:AssetThumbnailURL width="500">'<mt:Unless name="__last__">,</mt:Unless></mt:EntryAssets>); if ( entryAssets.length != 0) { var entrySlideshow = document.getElementById('entry-gallery'); var imgIndex = 0 function viewImage(direc) { if (direc == 'next') imgIndex++; if (direc == 'prev') imgIndex--; if (imgIndex >= entryAssets.length) imgIndex = 0; if (imgIndex < 0 ) imgIndex = (entryAssets.length - 1); slideshowImage.setAttribute('src',entryAssets[imgIndex]); return false; } var slideshowImage = document.createElement('img'); slideshowImage.setAttribute('src',entryAssets[imgIndex]); slideshowImage.setAttribute('alt','Slideshow Image'); entrySlideshow.appendChild(slideshowImage); var slideshowNav = document.createElement('p'); var slideshowPrev = document.createElement('a'); slideshowPrev.setAttribute('id','slideshow-prev'); slideshowPrev.innerHTML = '« Previous'; slideshowPrev.setAttribute('href','#'); slideshowPrev.setAttribute('onclick','viewImage("prev")'); slideshowNav.appendChild(slideshowPrev); var slideshowNext = document.createElement('a'); slideshowNext.setAttribute('id','slideshow-next'); slideshowNext.setAttribute('href','#'); slideshowNext.innerHTML = 'Next »'; slideshowNext.setAttribute('onclick','viewImage("next")'); slideshowNav.appendChild(slideshowNext); entrySlideshow.appendChild(slideshowNav); } </script>If you'd like to try this out, you'll need to download the latest beta or wait until the general release. Feel free to post your own versions of slideshow code in the comments! It's always great to see examples of how people are using the features of Movable Type.
just do these four simple things
Talking Points Memo's welcome message to the TPM Cafe is the most succinct guide to successful participation in social media I've ever read. Just do these four simple things: blog, discuss, recommend, follow & be followed.
it's kind of....a bummer
via www.youtube.com
A friend reminded me about Ellen this afternoon. I had forgotten how much I absolutely loved this ad.
5 Quick Questions with Bill Simmons
5 Quick Questions with Bill Simmons: For the handful of Minneapolites who remember 7QQ (which have all sadly been deleted from the internet), it’s been resurrected as 5QQ: Bill Simmons.
Greed rears its ugly head
Despite breaking last year’s Allen & Ginter code and having his very own card in this year’s popular Topps release, Jason Wong has been pretty outspoken about Topps not giving him any of his cards. That left Jason the task of purchasing his cards on eBay and trying to pull off trades to get as many of them as he could.
Recently, a customer of All-Stars Collectibles and Trading Cards pulled Jason’s best Allen & Ginter parallel, a “1 of 1″ wood card. The owner of the card shop wanted to help Jason get the card and did what he could before being struck with the customer’s outrageous asking price.
The customer who pulled the card wanted $350 dollars. To put that insane price into perspective, check out this similar 2007 Topps Allen & Ginter wood parallel of Albert Pujols that sold for $311 dollars on eBay. After a huge backlash towards the customer, Warren, the shop owner brokered the deal on his own for Jason.
You can check out Warren’s shop online HERE.
Old cities, still kicking
The 10 oldest cities which are still inhabited. Includes a few you've probably heard of (Damascus, Jericho, Jerusalem) and a couple of surprises. (via that's how it happened)
Tags: cities lists
Think He's On to Something
Steve Clemons on the Obama-Netanyahu relationship ...
Netanyahu is very clearly Obama's Khruschev.Netanyahu is poking the Obama White House, ridiculing his foreign policy team, and launching preemptive strikes at the very necessary deal-making that Obama must move forward in the region to shore up America's power position and global relevance.
The Moskowitz-Netanyahu Plan to expand settlements in East Jerusalem, clearly over the red lines set by previous presidential administration and Israeli prime ministerships, is designed to pommel Obama and deflate his power in the eyes of other regional stakeholders.
Obama needs to politely crush Netanyahu -- and do it with a smile, without losing his temper, just as Richard Wolffe -- in his new book Renegade: The Making of an American President -- describes Obama doing to political foes he politely vanquished.
Read the rest here.
Yankees Trail Mets By 10 Racks in “Subway Series of Bike Parking”
Yesterday, my Mets got shut out by the last-place Nationals, falling 10 games behind the defending world champion Phillies. Meanwhile, the Yankees grabbed sole position of first place -- for the first time in months! -- after beating Baltimore. It pains me just to type the words.Image: SI for Kids.
But take heart, Met fans, at least our team provides bike racks at the ballpark. Not so the Yankees. Sarah Braunstein at Sports Illustrated for Kids reports on a recent outing to their new stadium:
Whenever I bike anywhere, I always check to make sure there is a safe place to park. First, I checked out the New York City Department of Transportation to find the closest bike rack to the stadium. The closest one is at the Bronx Supreme Court, about four blocks from the stadium.
I figured in a city with so many bikers, and with hundreds of miles of bike lanes, there had to be something closer. So I did what any adventurous biker would do and called the Yankees themselves.
The answer to all my questions was ‘NO.’ There are no bike racks at the stadium. There is no bike parking. They cannot offer indoor bike parking, even for reporters. There is no possibility of parking a bike at or in the stadium.
The Mets, Braunstein discovered, have ten bike racks outside CitiField. In the grand scheme of transportation sins, Yankee Stadium's lack of bike parking pales beside its wanton profusion of traffic-generating car parking. And the Mets, despite their bike racks, are admittedly no livable streets angels (though the approach from the Willets Point station to CitiField is way nicer than the walk to Shea used to be).
Mostly, I just hope the O's bike-commuting number one starter, Jeremy Guthrie, reads this and gets a little more fired up every time he pitches in the Bronx.
How to be a regular at a restaurant
Ben Levanthal on how to become a regular at a restaurant.
Restaurants may be the only place on earth where the last impression is the most important. Admit it: Your opinion can be swayed, or at least rescued, by excellent desserts. Similarly, it's true for the house, and if you make a strong exit, they'll remember you next time on the way in. So, in addition to the aforementioned good tip, this means a few things: When you sense the restaurant wants the table back, give it to them (once you're a Regular, you'll have the corner booth for as long as you need it). Thank your server by name if he or she is in earshot when you get up to leave.
As noted in the comments, it's best not to try all of these at once, but this is pretty solid advice.
Tags: Ben Levanthal food how to
Kevin Spacey shows Twitter to David Letterman
Letterman gets about 3.5M viewers nightly, about 425% more than Spacey's followers
Patricia Highsmith YouTube Clips
“I Don’t Understand Murder”
On Capital Punishment
On Writing the Ripley Books
On the Need to Know
I never thought I did an especially good job of leading my students at The Culinary Institute of America to understand that knowing why food behaves in the ways that it does when we manipulate it, is just as important as knowing how to cook. I think at best I probably reinforced the belief that consistently positive outcomes in the kitchen are not possible if you don't understand the science to a few who already believed it. But I'm sure that my entreaties to question everything that happens and to not take anything for granted was lost on the majority of students who, in all fairness, were mostly of the popular opinion that an Institute was not, like a college or university, supposed to encourage skepticism as much as train them in a specific set of tasks.
However, expectations of the school and my role as a teacher there aside, the truth remains that unless you always cook from carefully vetted recipes in the same place on the same equipment with ingredients that are produced and stored under the same conditions, unexpected things are going to happen. And forget it if you, like most cooks, like to fiddle around with or develop your own recipes.
This point was driven home to me this morning during a reading of a method for making sour dough starter at Michael Ruhlman's blog. The method he described involved adding a cabbage leaf to a mixture of flour and water, letting sit overnight, dosing it with flour and water again and letting it sit for another night before using it. I don't doubt for a moment that the method produces the vigorously bubbling starter that he describes, but I'm not sure why it bubbles faster than a simple mixture of flour and water left to ferment for the same period of time.
The obvious answer is that there is yeast on the cabbage leaves that is introduced to the starter. But why would we assume that the yeast that lives on cabbage is capable of colonizing wheat? There are thousands of species of yeast, many of them quite host specific and not all of them capable of digesting starch. There is very little starch in cabbage so why would cabbage host significant number of starch digesting yeast?
Another possibility is that the cabbage is adding in invert sugar which the yeast gobble up. However, neither Ruhlman nor the person he learned the method from (Carri at Two Sister's Bakery in Homer, Alaska) report crushing the leaves to release sugar from the cells which, I think would be required to extract enough of the cabbages' measly <3% sugar content to produce the dramatic bubbling they report.
It is possible that what is introduced to the starter by the cabbage is some type of bacteria. Bacteria will produce gas just like yeast, and if the right kind are introduced will drop the pH and make the starter sour. One type of bacterium that is always found on cabbage that has not been cooked or fumigated is Leuconostoc bacteria which produces prodigious amounts of bad smelling gas. However, if Leuconostoc bacteria is present in Ruhlman's starter culture he reports no off odors. Not yet at least.
Not knowing what the cabbage is doing in his starter is not great. Professional bakers have been making starter in very specific ways from flour only for generations because that is the best way to assure a microflora that be built exclusively of a specific population of yeasts and lactic acid producing bacteria. I would not be at all surprised to find that in a few days he discovers that his starter has a big colony of funky smelling bacteria blooming on its surface. I've had that happen to me a few times after I've added something unique to my starter.The best sauce in the world is hunger.
Ribbon Stairs
Extremely beautiful, but these stairs seem a little scary.
[via Blue Ant Studio and Scene360]
©2009 Design Milk | Posted by Jaime in Architecture | Permalink | 5 comments
Sponsored Topics: Milk - art - Jaime - Architecture - Protocols
codecomplete: Code Complete #1: iPhone Development with Marco...
Code Complete #1: iPhone Development with Marco Arment
We discuss the world of iPhone development from how we both abuse UIWebView to the App Store.
If you’d like to hear two geeks discuss iPhone development for an hour, listen to this!
Programming Note: Jerry Manuel at 5 PM
Just a reminder…
Jerry Manuel will be on WFAN today at 5 pm, for his weekly interview with Mike Francesa.
To listen to WFAN live, online, click here.
Speaking of the media…
Omar Minaya will speak with reporters today at 3:30 pm.
Gambling your money away to a safe place
Eight Michigan credit unions are offering an unusual way to save: putting $25+ into a one-year CD comes with an entry to a raffle with a monthly prize of $400 and a yearly grand prize of $100,000.
This unusual CD is federally guaranteed by the National Credit Union Administration and pays between 1% and 1.5% annual interest, a bit lower than conventional rates. In 25 weeks, the program has attracted about $3.1 million in new deposits, often from people who have never been able to set money aside.
This reminds me of a recent observation by Sam Arbesman:
An intriguing coincidence: The repayment rate of individual loans in Kiva (a broker for individual loans around the world) is 98.50%, which is quite similar to the payback percentage of Las Vegas slot machines.
Why not put the lottery effect to work with Kiva? Instead of straight-up loans, enter lenders in a raffle and slightly decrease the return rate to account for the prize money. I bet (ha!) the lending rate would increase accordingly. (via waxy)
Tags: economics finance Kiva
The longest solar eclipse of the century
Earlier today, the moon passed directly in front of the sun, causing a total solar eclipse that crossed nearly half the Earth - through Nepal, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Myanmar and China. Today's was the longest total solar eclipse of the 21st century, lasting as much as 6 minutes and 39 seconds in a few areas. Despite cloudy skies in many of the populated areas in the path, millions of people gathered outside to gaze up and view this rare event. Collected here are a few images of the eclipse, and those people who came out to watch. (33 photos total)
These Wine Bloggers Are…
I’ve been staying out of wine blogging politics of late, and of wine blogging for that matter. Soon the store will be done and I’ll get back to writing again. I hope! In the meantime, another small battle has erupted, and Jeff’s post at Good Grape gives a good run-down of the latest power struggle [...]
Rumormongering: Momo Food Cart Could Hit NYC This Fall
Remember back on that glorious day in April when Momofuku ran a street cart out of a parking lot in Noho for an NBC New York Locals Only event? Well, perhaps it wasn't just for that sweet, sweet network dough. Perhaps, oh goodness, perhaps it was a trial run. Just in over the rumormill comes word that Team Momo is supposedly working on its very own mobile food cart. The menu is still unclear but expect some Momofuku staples and maybe even (!) ramen. Seeing what they put out at that event—it was epic—there truly are limitless possibilities.
It's hard to predict when or where it will strike, but if a Momo Cart hits the city sometime in the next three months and dominates the entire food cart/truck scene thereafter, don't say we didn't warm you. Van Leeuwen, Rickshaw, Wafels, La Cense: be afraid. Be very afraid.
· Hangover Observations: 'Secret' Dave Chang Street Lunch! [~E~]
testing, please ignore. apologies for the spam.
I told you to ignore this...and I even apologized for the spam. Why did you click through?
July 22, 2009 - An Educational Evening Getting to Know Your...
July 22, 2009 - An Educational Evening Getting to Know Your Meme (with Special Guest Urlesque’s Kelly Reeves)
Out of touch with 4chan’s /b/ board? Lost in friendly conversations about LOLcats? Not in tune with your social circle’s references to online epherma? Join the New York Web Television Meetup, Tilzy.TV, Urlesque, and the Know Your Meme crew for some serious internet pop culture edification.
On Wednesday, July 22, at the lovely confines of DROM, Kenyatta Cheese, Elspeth Rountree, and Internet Scientist Jamie Wilkinson will put their meme-knowing-prowess to the test as Urlesque’s numba one stunna Kelly Reeves grills them on what makes internet phenomenons phenomenal. Discover how and why the trio of Rocketboom producers and technicians have been able to create a popular spin-off web series that (in many ways) is more successful than its progenitor.
Details below. We hope to see you there.
What: An Educational Evening Getting to Know Your Meme (with special guest Urlesque’s Kelly Reeves)
When: Wednesday, July 22, 2009 6:30 PM
Where: DROM - 85 Ave. A (between 5th and 6th Streets)RSVP HERE
Powered By:
Your $6 or $10 (with drink ticket) donation goes to the Joshua Cohen and Jamison Tilsner Fund a.k.a “paying for the rental of the space”.
(via: knowyourmeme)
Virtually delicious
Simple video of a burger, fries, and a drink, right? Well, just watch until about 28 seconds in.
Food stylists, your days are numbered...some intern at Pixar is gunning for your job. (via red)
Tags: food video
The video EVERYONE wants to see
No one is perfect. Michael Jordan didn’t score 40 points every game, Joe Montana’s passes were intercepted 139 times, and Babe Ruth was once struck out by a woman. As great as athletes are, we don’t expect perfection from them each and every time.
I first heard about the incident that occurred at the Lebron James Summer Camp a few weeks ago. When an unknown college kid dunked on the greatest basketball player in the world, everything possible was done to cover up the evidence. Nike and Lebron’s own “people” confiscated the video and that was the end of that…. until now.
At 6:45 PM Eastern Time, the video Nike desperately doesn’t want you to see will air exclusively on TMZ. You can go ahead and spend your Internet time scouring for a blurry video of a homely Erin Andrews naked or you could wait till tonight for the video of an unknown kid dunking on “King James”.
Your choice.
Social Great
Social Great: One of the first products from FourSquare’s API: Social Great. It’s pretty simple — it shows the locations that are hot in nyc by hour, day, week, and all time — but it’s easy to imagine the potential.
MomoWire: A quick note on the Momofuku...
A quick note on the Momofuku Chicken Dinner resy site. Unlike Momo Ko, these can be booked a month out, not just a week. Of course, every dinner slot is booked through 8/18. [EaterWire]
Kernest
While the internet seems to have been abuzz about Typekit, Kernest has launched under the radar.
Fake Steve on China
Fake Steve:
We all know that there’s no fucking way in the world we should have microwave ovens and refrigerators and TV sets and everything else at the prices we’re paying for them. There’s no way we get all this stuff and everything is done fair and square and everyone gets treated right. No way. And don’t be confused — what we’re talking about here is our way of life. Our standard of living. You want to “fix things in China,” well, it’s gonna cost you. Because everything you own, it’s all done on the backs of millions of poor people whose lives are so awful you can’t even begin to imagine them, people who will do anything to get a life that is a tiny bit better than the shitty one they were born into, people who get exploited and treated like shit and, in the worst of all cases, pay with their lives.
Apple Confirms Death of iPhone Worker in China
Jim Dalrymple:
According to various Chinese media reports, the worker at Chinese manufacturer Foxconn committed suicide last week after a fourth-generation iPhone prototype for which he was responsible went missing.
According to Shanghaiist’s translation, what drove him to jump to his death from a 12-story building was the torture he was going through at the hands of Foxconn security.
Even if the missing prototype was stolen, not lost (and let’s not be naive about how unlikely it would be for someone to lose, Uncle Billy-style, a secret Apple prototype when it’s clear that Foxconn doesn’t exactly chalk such losses up with an “oh, well”), torture is evil. Apple needs to investigate this, publish the results, and if the man was truly tortured, sever ties with Foxconn.
The Dlisted Divide: Women Love Michael K! Women Hate Michael K!
From a lady, in our inbox: “I found your interview with MK condescending—if you find his site so vulgar, why write about it? Those of us who are regulars love it, as you can see from your post’s comments…. I’m not impressed.”
And from another lady, in our inbox: “i will no longer visit your site and i have stopped following you on twitter because of this. you featured the most misogynist blogger on the web. what kind of impact do you think it has when his readers (and now your readers) read slut, bitch and whore on a daily basis? shame on you. i hope your site closes down one day due to poor revenue.”
A Spain-Shaped Lesion on His Taint
Colbert took on ACORN last night in a hilarious interview w/ chief organizer Bertha Lewis, who was a great sport, but still, as everyone is, a victim of Colbert. Lewis actually previewed the segment with a blog post last night at TPMCafe.
Funny Pages
Last gasps for a dying medium: as the printed newspaper’s future looks increasingly precarious, some noble — but not necessarily game-changing — attempts are being made to revisit its former glory. This summer two different projects have ambitions to resurrect the long suffering funny pages, i.e., newspaper comic strips printed in a broadsheet (or broadsheet-esque) format. Even as newspapers seem to be continually shrinking, whether in page count or in the actual dimension of their pages, these comics are making efforts to look big.
Big Laughs
A project called The Big Funny aims to bring together comic strips and ideas from all over the world in a massive 48-page funnies section. Premiering next week in Minneapolis, the team behind The Big Funny hopes to upend the formula that determines the comics you see in contemporary newspapers: “Today’s small strips, with mostly predictable, safe themes and bland characters are a pale shadow of what newspaper comics were in their wild and colorful youth… [We are] collaborating to produce an oversized newspaper comics section like they would do it today if they still did it like they did it in the old days.” A decidedly independent-minded project from The International Cartoonist Conspiracy, The Big Funny features literally dozens of comics talents, some of them quite good, but most of whom you’ve probably never heard of unless you’re already steeped in this world.
Hump Day Hilarity
Over at the comic book mega-publisher DC Comics, similar ideas are driving their Wednesday Comics series, albeit with slightly more commercial potential. Wednesday Comics too is a full-size comics section, this one featuring some of the publisher’s marquee franchises (Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, etc.) and, starting earlier this month, printed in vibrant full color once a week. Though slimmer than The Big Funny at just sixteen pages, having gotten my hands on the first two issues I can say that they’re sixteen excellent pages, produced by some of the better comics talent out there. Like its rival in mainstream comics Marvel, DC Comics has no shortage of mediocre draughtsmen at its disposal — and they rarely hesitate to use them. Apparently none of them were invited to join this project, though. These pages are gorgeous.
Right: Dave Gibbons and Ryan Sook’s stunning second installment of “Kamandi” recalls the lost, large-scale craftsmanship once celebrated every week in strips like Hal Foster’s “Prince Valiant.”Big Comics, Big Money
In keeping with funny pages tradition, Wednesday Comics ships as a free insert to the mid-week edition of USA Today, though I don’t know anyone who reads that paper unless they’re staying at a Holiday Inn. More to the point, both it and The Big Funny are available for sale on their own, which highlights another major difference between the halcyon age these projects echo and today’s grimmer economic reality: Wednesday Comics costs US$3.99 an issue and the first and so far only issue of The Big Funny costs US$5 — US$10.95 postage paid if you can’t make it to Minneapolis for its debut. Ouch. Seems less funny now, somehow.
Her New York
I recently stumbled upon a Lower East Side blog called It Was Her New York. It's different than many of the other neighborhood blogs, mine included. I liked it, so I contacted its author, C.O. Moed, and asked her these questions.
photo by C.O. Moed
Q: I like the quietness of your blog. It feels somehow outside of the blogosphere hubbub. Like you're walking a different wavelength. How would you say your blog compares to other EV/LES neighborhood blogs? What made you start it?
A: The blogs of the East Village and Lower East Side are so much more “here and now”--a street-citizen journalism. Very similar to the way word traveled on the LES when I was growing up--someone would see something, tell someone who told the shopkeeper who told the next customer who called his/her spouse/ kid/ neighbor and before you know it everybody knew everything and usually someone was in trouble with their mother.
I began this blog to save the heart of a video doc project, IT WAS HER NEW YORK during a time I was losing so much--a suddenly ill parent who had been the main subject of the doc, a departing partner, and a constantly eroding home/ city. Each day there was less and less that I recognized and more and more that I was losing. So each moment I wrote about was layered not just with my own 48+ years of memories (I’m now 50) but also the memories of my family’s life here. (There seems to be so few corners of this city that don’t hold something of our lives here.) Perhaps it makes the tone of the blog a bit more nostalgic and perhaps sadder, more heartbroken. But I felt desperate to preserve or document what was being erased and I wanted to do it in the voice of my people – my family, my neighbors, my friends, my neighborhood, my New York.
photo by C.O. Moed
Q: You say your blog explores "the tender rubble that holds both my mother, Florence's, and New York's soul as one disappears into old age and the other into gentrification." Can you say more about this connection between the city and your mother?
A: Florence was a charming, eccentric, visionary, failed, indomitable, fox-trotting-with-the-girls pianist and more so, an artist. She, like the city, could only survive in a place that allowed expansion past conformity and small-mindedness. Even as dementia and illness slowly dissolved her ability to read music or the paper or write coherent ideas she still existed, seeking to speak to me about my writing, movies, art, food, and people who annoyed her. And to me, New York City has always done the same. No matter what stupid, overpriced, indulgent disaster takes the place of a mom-&-pop business or service, the heart and soul of New York still seeks expression that could only come from a city built on immigrant dreams and outrageous desire.
But regardless of that fortitude, it began to feel as if each day Florence got sicker, another hardware/diner/ shoe repair/ bookstore/ everything-you-need store disappeared. They both were literally disappearing together.
Also, this city was as much my mother as Florence was. I learned on its streets to survive and thrive as much as I learned to be an artist from under Florence’s piano. It was devastating to lose both of them. So I began to write to ensure they continued in one way or another. It helped me keep my own self and soul visible and living.
photo by C.O. Moed
Q: What do you/will you miss most about New York's tender rubble?
A: That’s like asking a fish at the fish market what it misses about the water.
It’s not just the neighborhood stores where I got what I needed, no matter what it was, the store owners who knew me, the neighbors on every block who looked like me or looked like who I grew up with, the waitresses in the diners who allowed me to sit with a tea as I sulked over bad love poems at 4am, or how everyone at the bar had the same amount of money or lack thereof in our pockets. I miss the sounds, the smells, the tastes that could only come from all of the above. I don't recognize these basic elements in my city anymore except in small moments and tiny corners, which is what I try to preserve in the blog posts. But what I miss most is the accent, the insight, the moxy, the rhythm, the walk, the eye, the street life and the cultural/human space to stretch into full self. I miss the city where how I move and breathe is normal, not an anomaly.
Q: When you say "It Was Her New York," what does that mean? How would you describe your mother's New York?
A: There's definitely a proprietary stance in the Her. Florence's New York allowed for the struggling artist to afford an apartment so they could begin their life in art and meet and join together with others doing the same. Her New York allowed for immigrants to begin again and expand into dreams of their own making. Her New York was where the freaks and revolutionaries were welcomed to change the world. All this was possible because there was housing, grocery stores, work spaces and opportunities that were all affordable to those with not much money in the pocket.
Where in today's New York is any of this possible? New York stopped looking like Florence (white hair, old woman in sneakers and jeans running wild and alive) and started looking like young Sex In The City on bad acid. We the people of HER New York were relegated to being outsiders.
photo by C.O. Moed
Q: Your bio says you were born on the Lower East Side when it was still a tough neighborhood. How did you experience that toughness?
A: LOL. Because it was still dicey to walk down the street and not get your ass kicked in. And I grew up in the good part of a bad neighborhood. Look, this life wasn't great but I didn't know that until I left the neighborhood and met people from higher classes/better neighborhoods. To me the toughness of home was normal and I didn't think it was such a big deal to grow up with the assumption of having to be a bit street smart to avoid getting beat up.
But until recently I still operated under that assumption. It's only when I started to notice that people didn't really have to pay attention on the street at night that I saw things were changing. Or when a friend took out of his bag a REALLY expensive video camera and I was like put that away you want to get mugged? and he said, "CO, look around you," and pointed to the fancy little cafes surrounding us. And DON'T get me started about how people carry their wallets and keys and handbags. I'd be a rich woman if only I could morally excuse stealing.
Q: Do you still live on the LES? A lot of people say the LES is better off now that it's "safe." As someone who lived through the tough times, do you agree?
A: I live in the East Village which is NOT the LES. The LES starts at Houston and I grew up on Grand Street. (Just overheard this faux-artist try to impress some girl by saying with a certain amount of mall-bought jadedness he lived in the LES on St. Marks Street. I mean, please. Sorry I digress...)
Safety has been bought with gentrification. How come the neighborhood wasn't cleaned up before tenements were renovated and tiny apartments rented for ridiculous amounts of money?
The danger on the street wasn't some cool slomo sequence in some edgy movie. It was my friend in the hospital for months because five guys jumped him and beat the shit out of him. It was seeing drugs destroy my first boyfriend. It was Florence getting repeatedly mugged and punching back to keep her bag (she did, successfully). Or me being stranded on the other side of Tompkins Square Park one late night and staying in a really dangerous and violent situation because walking through the park (a park I had played in as a little kid) was more dangerous and violent.
So yeah, I'm glad it's safer. I'm glad the night streets are filled with young people shouting woo woo under my window who aren't worried about getting shot mugged jumped raped killed. I just want to know why this couldn't have happened when it was still my or Her New York.
photo by C.O. Moed
- Visit "It Was Her New York"
- Visit "My Private Coney"
July 21, 2009
MapQuest releases driving directions web service
as Adam points out, now someone could overlay MapQuest routes on Google Maps [via]
Sam Raimi set to direct World of Warcraft movie (Update: It's official!)
Update: Blizzard just confirmed the story with a swift press release! Raimi's set to direct, and Charles Roven (producer of The Dark Knight) is set to produce. According to the presser, "the film will fall under Legendary Pictures' co-production and co-financing deal with Warner Bros." We certainly hope they've got deep pockets -- we imagine a World of Warcraft movie won't end up being a low-budget project. Original post is below.
We know our stuff about video game news, but when it comes to film scoops, we usually bow to the expertise of Ain't It Cool News' Harry Knowles. Imagine our delight when we read a recent report from the heavily bearded entertainment reporter claiming that Evil Dead and Spider-Man creator Sam Raimi would helm a film adaptation of World of Warcraft. According to Knowles, confirmation of this story will be hitting Hollywood trade publications later this week or next.
Where is this magical, magical news coming from? We have no idea -- but Knowles seems fairly certain. With Comic-Con just around the corner, and Blizzcon just around the corner that's behind that first corner, we're sure to hear more details soon -- if Knowles' report is accurate.
[Via WoW.com]Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments
Sam Raimi set to direct World of Warcraft movie (Update: It's official!) originally appeared on Joystiq on Wed, 22 Jul 2009 00:31:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Drama in the tub
“Nyerrrrrhe!!!”
“HALLLP!”
“OMGGGGGGGSTOPEET”
“My Paws are SLIIIIDINGKS!!! Ehn!”
“Why did you do this? Why?” [Head tilt]
“The middle-of-the-night-clawing you are foreseeing WILL COME TRUE”
“Not this same tile background AGAIN!!!”
“I give up.”
Uncle Wire is to thank, once again.
Posted in Top 4 Tagged: Kittens
left wing
Jesse Purcell left wing $35 no comment 5 colour silkscreen print 38"x26"
the real deal on the Amazon/1984 recall thingamabob
I was waiting to write about the Kindle story until I knew what the heck actually happeend. As you know, when journalists [or bloggers] write about technology, especially hot button stories, they tend to leave out important information. This is often because they don’t totally understand the mechanisms they’re describing, but also because certain people have vested interests in the story being told a certain way. No one says “A Microsoft virus” they say “A computer virus.” Anyhow… Copyfight, one of my favorite blogs has created a heavily hyperlinked timeline of what was going on with the situation in which Amazon pulled some titles (including Orwell’s 1984), titles users had paid for, off of Kindles. Granted, the blog post uses some heavy-handed language, it’s certainly far from objective, but let’s be not just fair but accurate when we try to explain the ways in which a book is not at all the same as an e-book. The differences matter.
Ambiance Is Not a Topping
"It sometimes seems as if he's living in an alternate pizza universe—one where Papa John is Chris Bianco and ambiance should be a topping that you can order like fennel sausage."
Mic check 1, 2, 1, 2. Bubbles B in the place to be. Comin' outta retirement to work ya like a fireman. What's good, sliceheads? I know it's been a minute, but I have to break you off with a little something.
I made a move to the Upper East Side (it's not all bad—Central Park, Museum Mile, D'Ag hags) and can't say much for the pizza thus far, but there's been a couple of places that are worth mentioning, if only for their delivery-pie consistency. A good delivery pie is pretty simple to me: some salty aged mozz, fresh sauce, and a crisp, well-done crust. If you're looking for anything more than that, you may be asking for too much.
It's hard for the fresh mozzers (Totonno's, Nick's, Al Forno) to deliver you a pie that's up to snuff because the cheese has to be eaten so quickly or else it cools off and hardens; it's not meant to last. It's why they call it fresh, ya know? Aged mozz, on the other hand, is meant to be enjoyed anytime, really—even microwaved. A pie with aged mozz can come 40 minutes later and still be on point. But their fresh mozz brethren? Better plan on dining in for those bad boys.
Nevertheless, I sat here only an hour ago with a small, aged mozz pie (half plain, half green peps and pepperoni) from Arturo's Pizza on 85th and York. (This joint is not to be confused with Arturo's on Houston—at least they make an attempt to know what they're doing.)
Man, what a waste. An overload of toppings and cheese is not gonna compensate for poor ingredients. If anything, it just makes the pizza worse, because there's more of the bad stuff to contend with! As I'm throwing away the excess stale green peps and coagulated grease blanket of cheese, I have to ask myself, if you're gonna go and clog your arteries, you may as well do so with high-quality pie, right? And that's what Slice is for—so you know where to go when you need a Pinch of that pizza by the inch (another bootleg purveyor of NY pie), but I digress....
The thing is, I housed that Arturo's pie straight up Kobayashi-style because I had denied myself pizza for the better part of two weeks. I know, I know, that sounds like some cruel form of self-punishment, but I just bought a grill and was kickin' teriyaki-style with my grilled chicken sandwiches. When the pizza came, I basically inhaled it in an attempt to recapture some level of awesomeness. I believe I succeeded.
Frank Bruno, the New York Times restaurant critic, often seen skipping about town in designer Austrian lederhosen, deserves some singling out. That dude is never quite telling it straight. It sometimes seems as if he's living in an alternate pizza universe—one where Papa John is Chris Bianco and ambiance should be a topping that you can order like fennel sausage.
His recent article on the uptick of artisanal pizzerias was admirable in scope, but there are several points of contention. For one, I think Kesté deserves a lot more credit than he gave it; without having tried Motorino or Luna Rossa yet, I think its Margherita is among the best out there.
And Tonda as being worth a try because of "its attractive setting, attentive service and side notes like respectable salads and snacks"? If I wanted a snack, I'd take a Snaxi to a deli and get a Snickers.
I'm just not with it—I'd be happier sitting in a jail cell for an hour if you gave me a 117th Street Patsy's Margherita and a Stella than trudging to one of his downtown pretenders. Methinks it’s a lot of bullocks, mates.
Shout out to Paulie Gee for what looked like some magnifique pies at his pizza party that AK wrote about the other day. Boy, am I sorry I missed that little soirée!
And that's the real.
"They can’t make any decisions, because they don’t know what they want, and they don’t know what they..."
“They can’t make any decisions, because they don’t know what they want, and they don’t know what they want because they don’t know who they are, and they don’t know who they are because they’re allowed to be anyone they want.”
- Kate Carraway
2009 Allen & Ginter Box Break: Pack 12
HEY! What happened to pack 11? Howcome I skipped from pack 10 to pack 12? It's simple, dear reader... Pack 11 required scans of five cards. Pack 12 required only three. Since I only had 43.8 seconds this morning to scan and upload cards, I went with pack 12 so I could get something posted today. When was my last A&G post anyway? People have Gint-a-Cuffed cases since I posted last.
148 Brad Lidge
127 JD Drew
90 Bobby Crosby
24 Steve Wiebe
38 Troy Glaus
AGHS22 Ken Griffey Jr. Sketch
50 Pat Neshek mini
NP44 Yuniesky Betancourt NP
Crack the Code adAwww, how precious. What a lovely Junior sketch card. I can't stay mad at Griffey, can I? YOU BET I CAN. Go insert a sockeye where the sun don't shine you backstabbin' money grubber! Oh, and guess what Ken, Braves are in second place and your M's are in third. HAH! I don't care if Seattle has the better record. BRAVES ARE IN SECOND PLACE!!! Garret Anderson is playing just as old as you are anyway.
The Mr. Neshek mini is making it into the official mini binder just for Pat's pivotal role in cracking the Ginter Code. Being the prestigious #50 I'm sort of apprehensive on who is going to get bumped* out of the book. The rest of the cards are kinda meh. I can't remember if Bobby Crosby dings me a point or not. I'm going to wait till half the box if ripped and then re-examine all my Gint-a-Cuff points when I have a couple hours to spare. I'll post my point total (which ain't nowhere near Beardy's 8000 for that one box) and then try to keep up with the points after that. I'm literally typing this post up during a break in my ICND-1 class.
There is one really good card other then mini Pat: The Steve Wiebe Donkey Kong champion card. Donkey Kong was a favorite of mine back in the day and I suuuuuuuucked at it. How he manages to kick ass on that machine I'll never know. I still can't even get past level two on a MAME emulator. He also looks less douchey than Billy Mitchell looks on his card. Steve came real close to breaking the DK record, but got tripped up by a power outage and the dreaded kill screen. Read all about it here.
* Is everyone clear on how my A&G mini binder works? One card per number, any year. Do I need to do a post on that? CAUSE I'LL DO IT SEE IF I DON'T
Essential postmodern books
An annotated list of 61 essential postmodern reads. I've read only five -- Heartbreaking Work..., House of Leaves, Infinite Jest, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Hamlet (??) -- and started (but didn't finish) another -- 2666.
Tags: books lists
How they dood it
If you are interested in how the Ginter Code was cracked, click here and BE AMAZED.
Apple Reports Third Quarter Results
Revenue and profits are up, Mac unit sales are slightly up, iPod sales are slightly down, and iPhone sales are way way way up.
(On the conference call, Apple stated that iPod Touch sales are up year-over-year, so regular iPod sales must be way down. They don’t usually break out iPod sales by model.)
Reorienting the war formerly known as “on Terror”
Parag Khanna, Director of the Global Governance Initiative and Senior Research Fellow in the American Strategy Program at the New America Foundation, recently coauthored with Michael A. Cohen an article in Foreign Policy entitled, “Where the Real Fight Is”. Khanna and Cohen reassess the feasibility of US military and political goals in Afghanistan versus Pakistan vis-à-vis the realities on the ground in both nations, and endorse a realignment of U.S. strategy accordingly. In light of the waning influence of the Taliban, the inability of Afghan security forces to contribute significantly to counterinsurgency missions, and the poor prospects for nation-building in Afghanistan, Khanna and Cohen advocate a shift in US focus and resources (i.e. the 20,000 newly dispatched troops and the $65 billion spent annually on the war in Afghanistan) to Pakistan, where improved US-Pakistani intelligence-sharing has translated into military success in the form of drone attacks on the Taliban and al Qaeda leadership.
Ultimately, the current U.S. strategy in Afghanistan will cost significantly more in U.S. blood and treasure, and it has at best a marginal chance of success. Far better would be a more limited strategy that eschews the goal of nation-building in Afghanistan and embraces that goal in Pakistan. It is there, not in Afghanistan, that the United States can deal al Qaeda a devastating blow and foster regional stability. The sooner the United States realizes that the better.
Parag Khanna will speak at TEDGlobal 2009 in Oxford this Thursday, July 23 in the Wordview Rethink session.
Last Stop for the Watson Rumor Train
Put down the wands - a wizard will not be joining the Columbia community in the fall. Multiple tipsters alerted us (with startling quickness) to Emma Watson finally going on the record about her Ivy destination. And yes, as predicted, Brown won this battle. Guess we'll have to settle for the White House.
Condé Nast to Close Men.Style.com
We just read over on The Cut (via Ad Age) that men.style.com will close come October once Si Newhouse et al establish stand-alone sites for both Details and GQ. Many of the staffers will thankfully head over to those two sites.
This is supposed to be part of the plan to give each title at 4 Times Square its own site which, you know, makes a lot of sense. But why the heck it's taking them so long is another matter.
Style.com is in the clear at the moment, but we wonder for how long. WWD reported this morning that consultants from McKinsey & Co. have been hired by the publishing giant to "realign Condé Nast to be a successful business in an emerging economy that is now predicted to be painfully slow in recovering" according to CEO Chuck Townsend.
No area of the company is off limits and we're betting that the web (long a thorn in Condé 's side) will be much discussed.
Sponsored Topics: Condé Nast Publications - Business - GQ - McKinsey & Company - Condé Nast
Conde Nast Says Goodbye to Men.Style.com, Hello to GQ.com, Details.com
Conde Nast Says Goodbye to Men.Style.com, Hello to GQ.com, Details.com:wow, I (and Peter, Kruks, Ashley, Soraya, other smart Nasty vets…) could have told you this YEARS ago. I can’t believe they finally realized they need to leverage the strength of their brand names online—through branded destination sites. I guess I should be applauding this move but I can’t help but shake my head and sigh. It’s like when your dad forgot your birthday, realized 10 months later, and bought you a cheesy Hallmark card to make up for it. Too little, too late Mr. Newhouse.I feel badly for CondéNet today. Men.Style creates incredible original content - video in particular - and I’ll be sad to see any of that go away thanks to this web consolidation. But Alli is right. Destination sites - as much as we love them and understand what they offer/ how they differenciate from simply magazines regurgated online - are not a smart idea from a branding perspective.
I just hope GQ.com incapsulates all that MSC offers now & took years to build.
I wonder if this means they’re finally moving off their clunky legacy Interwoven CMS, which was always the excuse for why it would take
CondeNetConde Digital weeks or months to create a new page layout for new web features. (It wasn’t the only reason, of course. But it was a frequently cited one that conveniently shifted the responsibility to the techies.)
Out with Central Park, in with an airport
This is amazing (or an elaborate joke)...a group of crackpots called The Manhattan Airport Foundation want to replace "underutilized" Central Park with an international airport.
Public dollars helped create Central Park in the 1850s. And public responsibility dictates that we transform this underutilized asset into something we so desperately need today. Manhattan Airport will prove New York City no longer allows it's vestigial prewar cityscape to languish in irrelevance but instead reinvents these spaces with a daring and inspired bravado truly befitting one of the world's great cities. The moment is now.
And about those special Central Park landmarks?
Tags: Central Park NYCUnder the current plan the Imagine mosaic and Strawberry Fields will be preserved however they will be located indoors within the main terminal concourse. Tavern on the Green will be given the option of applying for a franchisee lease in the concourse food court.
ninety9: spiers: The trend is generally that inter-generational wealth transfer leads to, um,...
The trend is generally that inter-generational wealth transfer leads to, um, diffusion (but, hey, doesn’t everyone want to get rich so their kids never have to work?), and depending from your investment position is, sure, family run companies present challenges. The NYT and the Bancrofts are two stellar examples of second generation and beyond dynasties that become problematic. But they were also really profitable for a long time. People accept inequitable shareholder relationships based on either honest assessment of risk, or stupidity. Google is a good example of a company that is as dictatorial as the Times when it comes to control, but because they are throwing off wads of cash, very few people are complaining.
I think style.com is stupid, but the age of the patriarch can’t work as critique when Fox News has highly similar characteristics (and the Post has just a bad a web presence). I just don’t think the sample set in media is large enough to determine where family versus private versus public (or age of the CEO) holds up, particularly when many of them started as dynastic family businesses (Hearst, Tisch, McClatchy, etc.) that transitioned fully to public but are doing just as bad (or perhaps worse).
Well, it’s a factor among many. But I don’t see much evidence that patriarchy helps in any way. Murdoch keeps musical chair-ing his kids in and out of his various businesses When Lachlan couldn’t run the Post, he got ejected, or “moved back to Australia to ‘spend more time with his family’” because of shit like this:
According to several sources close to the family, tensions between father and son had intensified in recent months over a number of issues, including Lachlan Murdoch’s opposition to the company’s recent relocation to New York from Sydney and his frequent absences from the office.
Although Rupert Murdoch rarely if ever takes a vacation, Lachlan Murdoch took 10 weeks off last year to go mountain climbing and sail his yacht, one News Corp. source said. During that time, he drew a salary of $1.8 million and a bonus of $2.34 million.
And I don’t think there’s been a Hearst or McClatchy at Hearst or McClatchy in a long time—probably to their benefit, when you consider the Hearst progeny. And the Tisches are probably case in point for what I’m talking about. The kids don’t seem to have run the company better.**
They’re all doing badly, thanks to ad declines and the economy in general, and yeah, you’re right that those are bigger factors, but I still think family-run companies lend themselves to a particular set of dysfunctions. And I only mention it because I think it’s something people overlook when they talk about the Times and CN.
(**Actually, I take that back about the Tisches. Looking at their charts since ‘78, they’ve fared okay—destroyed value in some places, but expanded significantly in key areas. On the whole, not too bad.)
The best there ever was
By Brian Williams, Anchor and managing editor
When I left CBS to come work at NBC, my colleagues organized a farewell gathering at a bar on the West Side of Manhattan. It had originally been scheduled for my last day of employment, February 26, 1993. However, that day, a truck bomb went off beneath the World Trade Center -- and I was on the air covering the story until my contract expired at the stroke of midnight. The party was re-scheduled for a few days later. At a certain point in the evening, as is common at such gatherings in our industry, a television was wheeled into the room and the crowd was shushed -- for the playing of the "going-away tape," a collection, usually, of well-wishers making jokes and blowing kisses goodbye. This particular tape was different, because it featured a personal message from Walter Cronkite. I had already lived a charmed enough life to be able to tell Walter that he was the guy I wanted to be when I was a small boy. He'd heard the same thing about countless other people during the course of his career, and yet because of his extraordinary kindness, there he was on my tape, with a personal message for me. He said it had come to his attention that I grew up in a household where dinner was not served until the CBS Evening News was over each night -- until the moment my mother heard him say, "That's the way it is..." He looked into the camera and said, "Brian, I never want you to miss another meal, so consider this your personal copy -- "That's the way it is." I was floored -- floored that he knew who I was, amazed that he had taken the time and the trouble...and feeling pretty lucky about life's good fortune.
I didn't know then...that just over a dozen years later, I'd be anchoring a network evening newscast... the job I watched Walter perfect so many years before. I have said for years, and to all who will listen: He's the guy I grew up wanting to be. Of course, there's only one Walter. All I can do now is hope that his example continues to guide me, and others, in work and in life. While in retirement and in his old age, he long ago left the public spotlight, now he's truly gone. As long as he was with us, there was always "Cronkite" to point to, to hold up as a living example. Now it is Walter's memory that lives with us all.Someone asked me yesterday if Walter would have embraced blogging. I actually think, if such a thing can be measured on a real-time basis, that if Walter were in the chair today, he'd like it. I think he would find it an excellent way to communicate with the audience, to try to be transparent and to explain things like I'm about to: I wrote the above post yesterday and forgot to send it on to our editor. My wife asked me last night, "No blog today?" That's when I realized I hadn't hit "send." Some days I use this space to admit errors the night before, sometimes I learn our coverage has touched a nerve when I see the email volume on a given subject. While it’s just speculation on my part, I think Walter would have liked the daily deadline aspect and the "reporter's notebook" aspect of a blog -- for all the material that can't fit on the air and is thus normally wasted. It adds context and conversation and depth, and it’s a part of our daily drill. On days when we remember to hit "send."
We'll look for you tonight.
Publisher's Report: (Some) Bloggers (May) Get Press Passes
Long-time readers of Gothamist may remember that we've applied for NYPD press passes a couple of times, and have gotten denied. The explanation we were given was that the NYPD only credentials traditional media— radio, print, and television— and that online reportage simply did not qualify. So it was with great interest that we attended today's public discussion of "Rules for City Issued Press Credentials" at New York Law School.
As part of a proposed settlement of a lawsuit brought by Norman Siegel on behalf of three online-journalists that had their applications for press passes denied, the city has agreed to consider revising the press pass rules. As part of that process, Gabriel Taussig of the New York City Law Department and Siegel outlined the proposed new rules for the three dozen journalists, bloggers, and other concerned citizens who showed up, and solicited some feedback. Here is an overview:
- Restrictions limiting press passes to certain mediums will be removed— in the future, online, offline, on-air, etc. will all be treated equally.
- To qualify for a press pass, the journalist or journalism organization will need to provide six clips from the last 24 months showing news-gathering activity that would merit a press card— that would include live reportage from police and fire scenes, public assemblies, government press conferences, or similar events.
- The new system will consist entirely of working press cards, reserve cards (issued to freelancers by a news organization), and single-event cards. The other press cards that were issued as a courtesy (but didn't allow the reporter to cross police or fire lines) will be eliminated.
- If an applicant for a press card is denied, there is a formal process to appeal, in which the city has a set period of time (90 days) to respond to the appeal. Previously, the city had no time limit for response, and applications often fell into a black hole of city bureaucracy.
After their presentation, people in the audience were allowed to ask questions. One of the main criticisms brought up is that it's difficult for a freelancer to assemble six clips without a press card, and without those clips the freelancer can't get a press card, creating a chicken-and-egg situation. Some of the mainstream organizations also wondered whether their managing editors would be allowed to get cards, given that they only report from scenes infrequently, but still need the cards for big emergencies like 9-11 or the Transit Strike. Other reporters were concerned the NYPD doesn't train its officers to respect press passes, and that the reserve press cards (which have no picture) are often impossible to use. And finally, some of the bloggers in the audience worried that the NYPD might reject our clips because they didn't have enough "on-the-scene" reportage, and the definition of that is vague. Does one fact reported from the scene count, or do you have to include an interview with a witness? What about a picture?
While most agreed that revising the rules was a good idea, a worry from mainstream media was what if, in emergency situations such as a fire, their reporters, photographers and camerapeople can't get good access to the scene—because there would be hordes of credentialed bloggers on the scene. Siegel said that he did not expect it be an issue (his example was every credentialed journalist probably does want to go to every Mayor Bloomberg press conference) but if it did, the various parties would gather again to determine a solution.
Under the new rules, it seems like Gothamist would qualify for the new credentials. Once the new rules go into effect (a process that will take many months), we'll have each of our full time writers and editors apply, and we'll also ask for a couple of reserve cards for our interns and freelancers. We'll report back once we're approved or denied. It is our hope that with the new rules, the playing field for bloggers and professional journalists will become a little more level, and we'll have access to the same sources and scenes that current mainstream journalists take for granted. Hopefully, as a result, the quality of our reportage will improve, and we'll be able to pick up some of the burden being shed by the dying mainstream media organizations.
Session 2 running notes: Josh Silver
Josh Silver makes affordable, adjustable eyeglasses with a dream to solve the vision problems of the world. He begins by asking the audience to raise their hands if they wear glasses or contact lenses, or if they've had laser refractive surgery. "It’s too many of yout to count," he says, "but the general statistic is about half." He asks us to project that statistic to the world. And as we do so, he asks that we remember that poor vision is not just a health problem, but educational and economic as well. If you’re a child in developing world with poor eyesight and no access to vision correction, you miss out on education.
According to Silver, the real problem is that there aren't enough eyecare professionals in the world to use the developing world's model of delivery for everyone in the world. He points out that some countries in sub-Saharan Africa have only one optimetrist for every eight million people. So, he came up with a solution based on adaptive optics (which also helped Andrea Ghez see the stars).
Running out of time, Silver gives a demo of his glasses with his adjustable lenses. He quickly puts them on and adjusts lenses by injecting liquid into the lenses through two ingeniously compact attachments. He declares "I can now see that guy running around in the back. And now that one."
These aren’t the only glasses like this in the world, he explains. Silver has put about 30,000 in use now. He delivers his a global vision for vision: To get one billion people wearing the glasses they need by 2020. Currently a pair costs $19, and the distribution hurdle will only be crossed when the cost is brought down to service populations that live on less than one dollar per day.
You Can Get Away With Anything in Traffic Court, With a Little Patience
To deter dangerous driving, first you need to catch the bad behavior. That's where Ray Kelly, the NYPD, and Albany legislators (who must grant New York City permission to install enforcement cameras) can make huge strides. But what happens after tickets are issued?What happens after a ticket is issued? For the full flow chart, see page 74 of Executive Order.
For a moving violation summons to hold deterrent value, it needs to carry real penalties in traffic court. But loopholes abound if a driver knows how to game the system. That's where the state DMV can make a big difference.
Chapter 3 of Transportation Alternatives' Executive Order [starts on page 35 of this PDF] explains how reckless drivers can escape consequences even after they've been caught violating the law. The big takeaway is that perpetrators can postpone the day of reckoning for their offenses, virtually at will. And the longer they put it off, the less the punishment matters. To understand why, here's a quick refresher in the DMV point system.
If you're a driver licensed in New York State:
- When you get convicted of a moving violation, points are added to your record, varying with the offense. Failure to yield? That's three points. Exceeding the speed limit by 25 mph? Six points. And so forth.
- If you accumulate 11 points, your license is suspended. This is the major deterrent in the system.
- However, the points only count toward a license suspension for 18 months. When the time window expires, that's that -- the points are no longer "active."
- Here's the rub: The clock starts ticking on those 18 months as soon as the cop gives you the ticket, but the points don't appear on your record until you're convicted.
So, let's say a driver who already has 8 points gets a ticket for running a red light. That's an additional three points, putting him or her over the 11 point threshold for a license suspension. But wait -- the driver can reschedule their traffic court hearing multiple times. By the time the driver appears in court for the final hearing, 19 months have elapsed since the initial red light violation. The driver gets convicted, but the points don't count toward a license suspension at all.
For those familiar with the system, the loopholes are inexcusable. Here's Nassau County Assistant District Attorney Maureen McCormick, quoted in Executive Order: "You have to have a consequence fairly quickly after the offense for it to have any real effect. It defeats the purpose if it can go on so long that the points expire before they even get on the person’s license."
Executive Order identifies two steps DMV could quickly take to remedy the situation:
- Distribute points to licenses from the time of conviction, not retroactively from adjudication. In other words, start the 18-month clock when the driver is done with traffic court. This would ensure that points stay on drivers' records for the full 18 months and can accrue towards suspensions.
- Allow violators to reschedule a traffic court hearing only once. Currently, cops can only reschedule a hearing one time, while drivers can postpone multiple times. If, at any hearing, the cop doesn't show up, the ticket will be thrown out. Advantage: drivers.
Learning How to Make Neapolitan Pizza from Keste's Roberto Caporuscio
Roberto Caporuscio, one of the partners-pizzaiolos at Kesté Pizza & Vino in Manhattan's Greenwich Village, led a Neapolitan pizza-making class last night. Before he began punching dough balls and spreading tomato sauce, he went over the basics. Naples is a couple hours south of Rome, and "the pizza from there is not better, it's just different." He gave us a little history on the famous Naples-originating Margherita pizza, which we were about to bake in the Kesté oven cranked up to 950°F.
A baker named Rafaele Esposito whipped up the first pizza Margherita in 1889 to welcome the Queen of Italy, Queen Margherita, to Naples. To make the pie a little more patriotic-looking, Esposito used tomato sauce (red), mozzarella (white), and basil leaves (green)—the colors of the Italian flag. Queen Margherita loved the pizza so much the concoction took her name. (Not sure if anything else she did, but it probably doesn't hold a candle to being a legendary pizza namesake.)
To make the Margherita at Kesté, Caporuscio uses Caputo brand flour from Naples (which contains no additives like the U.S. kinds, he points out), imported canned tomatoes, buffalo mozzarella, fresh basil, and extra virgin olive oil (the only fat he recommends for pizza). The recipe, adapted for normal, nonrestaurant kitchens, follows after the jump.
The workshop was sponsored by Time Out New York's Dining & Libation Society, which puts on awesome culinary events throughout the city on a regular basis. In the June 4–10 issue, the magazine awarded Kesté the honor of top new pizzeria in New York City.
Caporuscio offered some of the pizzaiolo newbies jobs last night after checking out the beautiful pies.
DIY Neapolitan Pizza Dough
- for 9 to 12 very hungry people -
Ingredients
3.75 pounds Tipo "00" flour
1 liter warm water
0.1 ounce fresh yeast
2.1 ounces salt
0.7 ounce sugar (optional)
Procedure
1. Split up the liter of water, using half to dissolve the salt, and the other half to dissolve the yeast. In a perfect world, Caporuscio thinks everyone should use fresh yeast, but he realizes it's not easy to come by. Dry is fine. Most people dissolve the salt and yeast in the same water, but Caporuscio keeps them separate.
2. Combine the flour and sugar. Many flours already have traces of sugar, but the Caputo brand doesn't, so throw a little in yourself. Then add the wet goods, and start working the dough.
3. Caporuscio learned how to mix by hand, but realizes that machines are helpful. If you have a KitchenAid, put it on the lowest speed possible. "One is fine. But if zero was a speed, that'd be better." However you decide to mix the dough, stop after ten minutes, or when it isn't sticky anymore. The key here is s l o o o w.
4. Let dough sit for an hour, covered under plastic.
5. Form into balls, about 20 to 25 ounces each. Store balls in a cool spot, either the fridge or counterspace, for at least five hours to let the dough rise.
6. Preheat oven to 500°F, or however high you can blast that heat up. Spread dough on a baking pan or stone, gently stretching the edges.
You probably don't have one of these pizza infernos, custom-built by two guys from Naples with volcanic stone, but you want one, huh?
7. Bake the dough for ten minutes before any toppings come into play. Now add the tomato sauce and cheese, etc. If you baked the whole shabang at once, the cheese would turn to water and the meats would dry out. So don't. At Kesté, each pie only bakes for about 55 seconds because it's so fracking hot in there. The dude on pizza peel duty boasted his PR: "45 seconds!"
Roberto Caporuscio's Pizza Wisdom
Tossing? Psh, no! He is not a tosser. "Naples is a poor city. We learned not to play with our food."
Fresh or tap water? Tap is cool. Caporuscio has made pizza in many cities, from Las Vegas to Italy, and tap always seems to do the trick.
My baby!
Tomato Sauce? Caporuscio goes easy on the red stuff. In fact, it's almost just pink by the time he spreads it around, nice and good.
The Crust? The puffy pockets have an English muffin chewiness, rather than a charred cracker quality. The Neapolitan crust is steamy and stretchy with some black blisters, almost like naan. If you're a fan of firm, crisp crusts, you may be disappointed.
Pizza bones. I didn't leave many.
Using a Stone? Make the dough thicker if you're using a pizza stone instead of a baking pan with edges. The stone can make those bottoms crispier, and if you want airier, you'll need to add more flour.
Weather? Humidity is dangerous for pizza. But in many ways, you are safer at home baking small batches in the kitchen—especially with that air conditioner blasting.
Learning How to Make Neapolitan Pizza from Keste's Roberto Caporuscio
Roberto Caporuscio, one of the partners-pizzaiolos at Kesté Pizza & Vino in Manhattan's Greenwich Village, led a Neapolitan pizza-making class last night. Before he began punching dough balls and spreading tomato sauce, he went over the basics. Naples is a couple hours south of Rome, and "the pizza from there is not better, it's just different." He gave us a little history on the famous Naples-originating Margherita pizza, which we were about to bake in the Kesté oven cranked up to 950°F.
A baker named Rafaele Esposito whipped up the first pizza Margherita in 1889 to welcome the Queen of Italy, Queen Margherita, to Naples. To make the pie a little more patriotic-looking, Esposito used tomato sauce (red), mozzarella (white), and basil leaves (green)—the colors of the Italian flag. Queen Margherita loved the pizza so much the concoction took her name. (Not sure if anything else she did, but it probably doesn't hold a candle to being a legendary pizza namesake.)
To make the Margherita at Kesté, Caporuscio uses Caputo brand flour from Naples (which contains no additives like the U.S. kinds, he points out), imported canned tomatoes, buffalo mozzarella, fresh basil, and extra virgin olive oil (the only fat he recommends for pizza). The recipe, adapted for normal, nonrestaurant kitchens, follows after the jump.
The workshop was sponsored by Time Out New York's Dining & Libation Society, which puts on awesome culinary events throughout the city on a regular basis. In the June 4–10 issue, the magazine awarded Kesté the honor of top new pizzeria in New York City.
Caporuscio offered some of the pizzaiolo newbies jobs last night after checking out the beautiful pies.
DIY Neapolitan Pizza Dough
- for 9 to 12 very hungry people -
Ingredients
3.75 pounds Tipo "00" flour
1 liter warm water
0.1 ounce fresh yeast
2.1 ounces salt
0.7 ounce sugar (optional)
Procedure
1. Split up the liter of water, using half to dissolve the salt, and the other half to dissolve the yeast. In a perfect world, Caporuscio thinks everyone should use fresh yeast, but he realizes it's not easy to come by. Dry is fine. Most people dissolve the salt and yeast in the same water, but Caporuscio keeps them separate.
2. Combine the flour and sugar. Many flours already have traces of sugar, but the Caputo brand doesn't, so throw a little in yourself. Then add the wet goods, and start working the dough.
3. Caporuscio learned how to mix by hand, but realizes that machines are helpful. If you have a KitchenAid, put it on the lowest speed possible. "One is fine. But if zero was a speed, that'd be better." However you decide to mix the dough, stop after ten minutes, or when it isn't sticky anymore. The key here is s l o o o w.
4. Let dough sit for an hour, covered under plastic.
5. Form into balls, about 20 to 25 ounces each. Store balls in a cool spot, either the fridge or counterspace, for at least five hours to let the dough rise.
6. Preheat oven to 500°F, or however high you can blast that heat up. Spread dough on a baking pan or stone, gently stretching the edges.
You probably don't have one of these pizza infernos, custom-built by two guys from Naples with volcanic stone, but you want one, huh?
7. Bake the dough for ten minutes before any toppings come into play. Now add the tomato sauce and cheese, etc. If you baked the whole shabang at once, the cheese would turn to water and the meats would dry out. So don't. At Kesté, each pie only bakes for about 55 seconds because it's so fracking hot in there. The dude on pizza peel duty boasted his PR: "45 seconds!"
Roberto Caporuscio's Pizza Wisdom
Tossing? Psh, no! He is not a tosser. "Naples is a poor city. We learned not to play with our food."
Fresh or tap water? Tap is cool. Caporuscio has made pizza in many cities, from Las Vegas to Italy, and tap always seems to do the trick.
My baby!
Tomato Sauce? Caporuscio goes easy on the red stuff. In fact, it's almost just pink by the time he spreads it around, nice and good.
The Crust? The puffy pockets have an English muffin chewiness, rather than a charred cracker quality. The Neapolitan crust is steamy and stretchy with some black blisters, almost like naan. If you're a fan of firm, crisp crusts, you may be disappointed.
Pizza bones. I didn't leave many.
Using a Stone? Make the dough thicker if you're using a pizza stone instead of a baking pan with edges. The stone can make those bottoms crispier, and if you want airier, you'll need to add more flour.
Weather? Humidity is dangerous for pizza. But in many ways, you are safer at home baking small batches in the kitchen—especially with that air conditioner blasting.
Related: Keste Pizza & Vino: What You Can Expect
Evan Williams vs the Internet
In October 1994, at the dawn of blogging, I wrote a piece that actually shook the software world. At the time, the idea of a mere software developer expressing an opinion in public, unedited, in his own words, without the help of a major publication, was unheard of. It had never happened.
The piece was called Bill Gates vs the Internet. The thought was pretty simple. The tech industry was mired and exhausted. Too many BigCo's struggling to be the one who controls the future. As if a company could control the future. But the headlines in the business press encouraged them to think this way. Much as the leading tech blogs encourage Schmidt, Zuckerberg and Williams today to think of themselves as masters of the universe. They aren't and it's a losing strategy today as it was 15 years ago.
The problem for Bill Gates in 1994, the newly crowned King of Tech, was the Platform Without a Platform Vendor, the Internet. The difference between the Internet platform and the Microsoft platform was this: No Microsoft. No one to hold on to the family jewels. No one to put a developer out of business if they personally offended Bill. No one to keep the personalities of developers under control. No one to cut off their air supply.
In 1994, there was a revolution brewing. Bill didn't believe. But it happened anyway, even though he struggled mightily against it.
Blogging is one of the things that came out of this revolution, and along with it archives. So I can point to a piece I wrote in 1998 and it's still there. It was systematized, in software. This idea didn't come from a BigCo, and it didn't get killed by one. The free Internet solves problems pretty well. BigCo's don't solve problems.
So now instead of Bill Gates it's Evan Williams.
I read the piece on TechCrunch and thought it sounds like the transcripts of conversations from Microsoft in the mid-90s. Both were trying to compete with the Internet. Ev's problem is how is he going to keep his key engineers from defecting to the competition. How are they going to let developers use the "firehose" without using it to kill TwitterCorp. These are problems the Internet doesn't have. It doesn't employ any engineers, and when they leave one company to work for another they still work for the Internet. On the Internet no company owns all the data, so no one can control it. If you don't like the way a service works, use another.
The tech industry keeps having this argument with the Internet. It keeps thinking "this time we gotcha" but nahh, the Internet keeps right on going.
Moral of the story: If you find yourself in competition with the Internet, you should find a way out. Imho.
The backstory to Walter Iooss' photo of "The Catch" and other great Sports Illustrated photos
Digital Journalist has a great collection of photos from Sports Illustrated photographer Walter Iooss along with explanations of how he got the shots. Neat backstory to this photo of “The Catch” (Joe Montana to Dwight Clark TD pass in 1982 Championship Game), the most famous picture he’s ever taken.
Walter Iooss Jr. had set up in the end zone and snapped a soaring Dwight Clark in what has become one of the magazine’s enduring images (as the abundant yellow stickers on the slide attest). Iooss’s picture, though, was the result of more than positioning. He’d been shooting the beginning of this play with a telephoto lens, but as he saw the action coming his way, he quickly switched to a camera around his neck with a 50-millimeter lens, better suited to close-up action. He framed the moment perfectly.
In the Digital Journalist piece, Iooss explains why the Clark shot is one he never wanted to happen.
What’s ironic about this picture, which came to be known as The Catch, is that I never wanted it to happen. I had been covering the Dallas Cowboys the entire NFL season. I was given total access: the locker room, the trainer’s room, the off-limits spots where no photographer had been before. I’d seen the things the Cowboys did so they could play in pain. I’d become friends with one player who, the first time I was in the locker room, came up to me and said, “I want you to take a picture of me getting a needle in my shoulder.” I looked around, thinking maybe I was being put on, and said, “You’re kidding, right? Why would you want me to do that?” He said, “Because I want to give it to my son to make sure he never plays football again.” On the day of this game the same player said, “I don’t know what to do. My knee is in such pain, my shoulder is in pain, but I can’t take two shots. It’s too much. I don’t know which one to take.” With 58 seconds left in the NFC Championship Game, Joe Montana rolled out to my left and launched a pass. Something to my right came into my peripheral vision, and I reached for my camera with the 50mm lens, trying to focus. I just started hitting the motor drive and shot. Dwight Clark caught the ball probably 20 feet away from me. The 49ers scored the touchdown that sent them to the Super Bowl and the Cowboys’ season was over. I was heartbroken. I had spent a whole season with the team and had gotten close with the players. I went in the locker room after the game and the mood was as if somebody had lost their family in a car crash. In a single moment my whole story went down the tubes. But the shot of Clark catching the touchdown pass ran on the cover of SI and became the most famous picture I’ve ever taken.
Related: Sports Illustrated has a new book called Slide Show:
The thing about slides, beyond the obvious that you could touch them and hold them up to the light, was that you could scribble notes on them. You might use the slide mount to jot down a quick description of what’s happening in the photo. You could give the mount a return to stamp, if you were messengering the slide across town in those days before e-mail…These artifacts of a rapidly receding era of magazine publishing brim with a found beauty; a humble cardboard square somehow fuses a photographic moment with its slowly accumulating embellishments of history.
See more slides from the book.
Simple Sourdough Starter
Photo by DonnaFor those who want to capture and grow your own yeast to make bread for the BLT From Scratch Challenge, or for anyone who simply wants to make delicious bread at home (bread far more flavorful than that made from commercial yeast), here's how to do get a starter going and do it fast.
A while back, Carri Thurman, of Two Sisters Bakery in Homer, Alaska, left a comment on my blog about using purple cabbage as the source of abundant wild yeast. Last week I decided to give it a shot. Worked so easily (I had a bubbling starter in 48 hours), I didn't trust it and did it again. Worked great.
I've long been a huge fan of Nancy Silverton's Breads of La Brea Bakery, a book devoted to breads leavened with sourdough starters. It's a great bread book, but her method for achieving a starter takes fifteen days and gives highly specific flour and water amounts for feeding the thing, all of which is clearly unnecessarily difficult by about 12 days and pounds of wasted flour. I know she was trying to make it fool proof, so that even a beginner would be successful, and when I did her version years ago, it did indeed work.
But so did Carri's and it's so easy. In a quart measuring cup or other container, put in equal weights of flour and water, about 8 or 10 ounces of each. Stir it and and put a leaf or two of organic red cabbage. Carri covers it, I leave mine open hoping to lure more unsuspecting gas producing microflora.
Let it sit overnight, then add another addition of flour and water, same amounts as before. You should have an active starter after another night. Carri recommends 12 hours between feedings. Also, if conditions are too hot or too cold, this may affect your starter. If you don't have a bubbly starter after 48 hours, give it another day.
Here's a picture of Carri's really healthy starter. This has been well developed and well used; it takes a little more feeding and use to get it this healthy. The starter pictured above had been fed about an hour before the photo was taken, so the yeast is just starting to get going. The more you work with your starter, the more you'll get a sense of its activity level and so you'll know when they'll make the best bread (make bread when they're very hungry!).
Carri's ratio for bread is right on the money, too. 1 part starter : 1 part water : 2 parts flour. Add salt, about 2% of the total weight. So for a good sized country loaf, use 10 ounces starter (and thus .8 ounces salt). If you're metric, use 300 grams starter, 24 grams salt.
Carrie says it doesn't have to be cabbage but anything that attracts "that white film...grapes, even cumin," she says. Funniest part of the story is that Carri got it via Martha, a fact she seems slightly embarrassed by:
"My version came from a very old Martha Stewart episode where she was visiting a bakery in NYC and the guy there did it. It was at least 10 years ago, I was home from work with a sick child and saw the program and immediately wanted to try it, though I had no oganically grown red cabbage to use. Oddly enough the next day a good friend stopped by with some red cabbage from his garden and the rest is history! Martha was my only way of getting information at that point in my life!"
Cheers to you both! People who grow their own cabbage, to make their own starter, for the BLT Challenge get extra points!
Is Ham the New Bacon?
"There are a number of seriously delicious artisanal hams being made all over this pig-happy country of ours."
That is the porcine question of the day. It all started with Italian prosciutto di Parma, progressed to Serrano ham from Spain, and then of course moved to the ne plus ultra of European ham, the black-footed (patenegra in Spanish), called Jamon Iberico. But now American artisanal ham makers are getting in on the act. Herb and Kathy Eckhouse started making extraordinary La Quercia prosciutto in Des Moines, Iowa. How extraordinary? Italian chefs in America who worship at the feet of Parma ham like Mario Batali started taking notice.
Now third generation curemaster Sam Edwards working with Heritage Foods USA and Newman Berkshire Farms and has given birth to what can only be described as country ham and prosciutto's love child. It's called Surryano (Edwards is in Surry, Virginia, where "ano" refers to Serrano), and according to Harold McGee's piece in the New York Times, it sounds pretty heavenly:
Have you ever placed a vanishingly thin morsel of rosy meat on your tongue and had it fill your mouth with deepest porkiness, or the aroma of tropical fruits, or caramel, or chocolate? Or all of the above? A really good dry-cured ham can do just that. Not a standard pink, cooked ham, juicy with injected brine, but a raw ham preserved by the application of dry salt, hung up to age for months or years, then sliced paper-thin and eaten as is, uncooked, yet transformed into the intense, silken essence of meat.
"The intense, silken essence of meat." Wow! When Harold McGee waxes rhapsodic, it's definitely time to taste this ham. So I was thinking that I would order some when out of the blue, a messenger showed up at Serious Eats World HQ with a cute plastic-wrapped portion of Surryano ham. Ham-a-lleujah, the Serious Eaters all said.
The Surryano ham is:
- Hickory smoked
- Aged more than 400 days
- From pure-bred Berkshire pork for ideal marbling, richer flavor
- 100% pasture-raised under certified humane conditions
- No antibiotics, no added hormones
But is it seriously delicious?
We took the ham out of the fridge, then out of the plastic. We let the ham breathe (I know it sounds pretentious) and then put it on a Sullivan Street Bakery baguette called a stirrato. No condiments touched this ham, no mustard, no olive oil, no butter, no mayo, no nuthin'.
And it didn't need any of them. The Surryano ham was world-class seriously delicious: porky, nutty, salty, sweet, smoky, fatty, meat-tastic. It might be the best American ham sandwich ever; no check that, it is the best American ham sandwich ever. Actually, I can't make such a definitive statement.
There are a number of seriously delicious artisanal hams being made all over this pig-happy country of ours. I have now decided that we must taste each and every one of them at Serious Eats World HQ in the coming days and weeks. Just this morning I got off the phone with Herb Eckhouse ordering some fairly recent additions to his line of wondrous pig products.
When we have concluded our American artisanal ham tour by mail, we will know for sure if ham has become the new bacon. Until then, as we've said before on Serious Eats, praise the lard, praise the lard.
Ohne Titel
Ohne Titel, Franz Graf. 1985.
Learning from a Polite Society
Examiner Column for July 21.
Last week, those of us from George Mason University staying at Exeter College, Oxford during the summer school program had the pleasure of watching the taping of BBC’s Inspector Lewis—a sequel to the ever-popular Inspector Morse series. Filming took place next door, at Lincoln College, and we were able to see Lewis and his own Lewis-like sidekick rehearse and tape the same one-minute scene over and over.
We were impressed with the polite interaction of camera crew, technicians, and actors with those of us watching from the opposite sidewalk. They asked us, politely, not to take flash photos during filming, and to move over if they planned a shot that included our side of the street. They stopped to allow bicycles to pass, and at both ends of the street stood signs that read, “CAUTION. FILMING IN PROGRESS. The Producers and Crew would like to apologise for any inconvenience caused.”
The British are often issuing apologies and thanks. When I leave a shop without buying anything, the shopkeeper thanks me for stopping in. If a subway is a few minutes late, there is an announcement apologizing for any inconvenience, and when riders exit the front of a bus they always thank the driver. A sign behind the bus driver reads: “When the bus is moving you must not stand forward of this point or distract the driver without good reason.” Signage in the U.S. is never so polite!
Are the British generally more courteous than Americans? I wouldn’t necessarily draw that conclusion, although there is plenty of evidence to support it. I think the British conform to the rules of a polite society much more naturally than do Americans. Our signs efficiently instruct us to do something, or not do something—but they rarely apologize or thank us.
The flip side of this extreme politeness, however, is the well-known British acid tongue. Journalists in the UK can make short work of politicians and celebrities, whereas the U.S. press corps tends to more moderate criticism. “A true friend stabs you in the front,” is Oscar Wilde’s comment on a society well known for its rapier wit. Another of his aphorisms observes, “A gentleman is one who never hurts anyone's feelings unintentionally.”
Yet even if politeness in the UK is for form’s sake only, there’s a lesson for visitors like us. There is no talking during lectures--rare in an American classroom--and students thank and apologize more here. Even the GMU student who has been ill twice during the program has assured me that she is having a great time and is grateful for the chance to study at Oxford.
When I was new to teaching, I rarely thanked classes for their attention, or their good work. In the last ten years, I almost always do. At Exeter College, every lecturer thanks the audience for their attention, and many in that audience come up afterwards to offer thanks in return. It’s important to make explicit the gratitude that teachers or students think goes without saying. Very little in human interaction “goes without saying,” and that has become a lesson as valuable as any other at Oxford. And thank you for reading this column!
To your brain, information = sex
A new study shows that primates literally thirst for knowledge - if that knowledge tells them how much water they are about to get. If the brain releases dopamine when it anticipates gaining information, that lends support to the idea of Internet addiction, doesn't it?
July 20, 2009
'memo clock' by designone
'memo clock' comes with a board marker
image courtesy of christine won
seems fitting to take notes on objects you look at and use daily to remind yourself of important things.
the 'memo clock' is a table clock made from a white ceramic body with red metal hands by designone
for thehaki. the clock has a re-writable surface, allowing users to erase and leave notes for themselves
or others, giving you the liberty to 'not be forgetful'.
the clock has a ceramic re-writable surface
image courtesy of christine won
leave important messages for yourself and others
image courtesy of christine won
for more information you can contact designone at: thedesignone@gmail.com
2009 Allen & Ginter code cracked!
Depending on who you ask, there’s not much Nick Jacoby can’t do. A couple of months ago this University of Louisville graduate returned to his childhood hobby of collecting baseball cards. Within months he was a regular reader of Wax Heaven and even won a contest a couple of months back.
Nick, who can solve a Rubik’s Cube in less than a minute desperately needed a new challenge. After reading about last year’s Topps Allen & Ginter contest, he knew it was worth a shot to try the 2009 version. After bustin’ a few packs, Nick was on the right path so he enlisted the help of Mike of JD’s Wild Cardz and began to work overtime.
After just a few days, Nick and Mike broke the 2009 Allen & Ginter code. This was eventually verified by a Topps email stating they were the very first to break the code, which revolved around injured Minnesota pitcher, Pat Neshek. It’s truly an amazing feat and one I am honored to have witnessed.
Below is a quick interview with Nick:
1. How much of your life have you spent collecting and what brought you back?
I first started collecting in 1987 when I was 6 years old. My dad brought home a cello pack of ’87 Topps baseball with the wood border – it was love at first sight. I gave up collecting about 10 years later after I got “too cool” for the hobby. I started collecting again earlier this year after I read about the ‘83 Fleer Project. I wanted to get each card of the ’87 Topps baseball set signed, but after I saw how much the hobby had changed, I started buying new product instead. Now I’m hooked again! I actually started my own card blog about a month ago but haven’t done much with it lately because I figured it would be too hard to get visitors…maybe I’ll pick it back up hoping publicity about the code break will start generating traffic.
2. At what point did you think you had a legitimate shot at cracking the Ginter code?
I’ve always been very good at puzzles and things of that nature (as evidenced by the Rubik’s Cube video) and I knew I wanted to give it a shot this year if I could make some time for it. And no, I’m not as big of a nerd as I sound! I noticed some interesting aspects of several of the Ginter Code cards when I opened my first boxes, and my mind started racing from there. I was looking for someone who wanted to team up on the code (including Mr. Wax Heaven himself, to whom I got the response “I’ve never been good at those”) and found Mike from JD’s Wild Cardz. We spoke about some interesting things we were both seeing, and we took off from there. I honestly didn’t know I was on the right track until a couple hours before I submitted the answer and was worried I was on a wild goose chase (more to come on this when we publish a blog with the step-by-step solution)
3. How many hours would you estimate went into cracking the code?
I bought my boxes the evening of Friday the 10th and first started looking into it then. Mike and I began sharing information at around 4pm ET on Saturday the 11th and were in constant contact pretty much through Monday the 13th at around 8pm when I submitted the final answer. All in, I’m guessing we spent about 25 to 30 hours a piece but it could have been more.
4. Since returning to The Hobby, what has been your favorite baseball product?
Honestly, my favorite product is probably 2009 Allen & Ginter, with 2009 Goudey coming in a close second place. And no, the Ginter Code didn’t have anything to do with making A&G my favorite!
5. Considering this year’s prize has been somewhat vague, what would your ultimate dream prize for cracking the Ginter code be?
I could think of plenty of things for my dream prize (maybe a million bucks or a ’52 Mantle!), but a realistic dream prize would be my own card in next year’s set. That is originally the reason I set out to crack the code as I thought it was a prize. I’ve heard this year’s prize is a set of autographs, but I don’t know much else other than that. Topps contacted me to tell me congratulations and that I was the first and only person to crack the code, and also that they would be in touch regarding the prize, but I have not heard back yet on that front.
How Amazon's remote deletion of e-books from the Kindle paves the way for book-banning's digital future.
Let's give Amazon the benefit of the doubt—its explanation for why it deleted some books from customers' Kindles actually sounds halfway defensible. Last week a few Kindle owners awoke to discover that the company had reached into their devices and remotely removed copies of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm. Amazon explained that the books had been mistakenly published, and it gave customers a full refund. It turns out that Orwell wasn't the first author to get flushed down the Kindle's memory hole. In June, fans of Ayn Rand suffered the same fate—Amazon removed Atlas Shrugged, The Fountainhead, and The Virtue of Selfishness, with an explanation that it had "recently discovered a problem" with the titles. And some customers have complained of the same experience with Harry Potter books. Amazon says the Kindle versions of all these books were illegal. Someone uploaded bootlegged copies using the Kindle Store's self-publishing system, and Amazon was only trying to look after publishers' intellectual property. The Orwell incident was too rich with irony to escape criticism, however. Amazon was forced to promise that it will no longer delete its customers' books.
[more ...]
Best. Mailday. Ever.
Today is the best day of collecting I have experienced since my return in 2007. It’s been well over a year since I began collecting Andrew Miller and I will be the first to admit that it hasn’t been the easiest thing to do. For starters, once a top level prospect, Andrew is in his third below average season in the Majors.
Second, with Andrew’s spotlight dimming, companies have been including him less and less in new products. Finally, with my finances is dire straights, I have been to just one game this season, causing my interest in my own collection to die down (until Allen & Ginter came around).
Today, fellow blogger and Wax Heaven friend, Kory, sent in these cards as a part of a trade. It is the only three cards I obsess about on a daily basis. In the lot, you will find a Black & Gold Refractor, along with an extremely rare Xfractor #’d to just 25 from 2007 Topps Finest.
After breaking through the BGS holders and nearly losing a finger, I have the best Andrew Miller cards anywhere. In fact, without bragging, I can finally say without a shadow of a doubt that I am THE Andrew Miller Super Collector. My collection is now over 150 cards deep, with over 50 of those being certified autographs.
As a bonus, Kory sent over two bonus autographs and reader “M.Ryan” was kind enough to send me two more 2009 Topps Allen & Ginter cards I needed. This has to be the very best day of 2009, without a doubt. I would like to thank every single reader who has helped my collection grow, this is truly an awesome day to be a collector.
In return, Kory will receive a 2009 Bowman Red Refractor Greg Halman.
Nice cards but they feel trapped.
No thanks, Beckett Media...
Click on the image to see a full-size scan!
Bonus Andrew Miller cards!
Ten Years!
While I'm still hard at work at responding to all the requests that have been made, I had to take a moment to mark the tenth anniversary of this blog today.
I could ramble at length about the many ways in which writing this site has enriched my life, but suffice to say that every part of my personal and professional lives has been utterly transformed by the connections I've made through this site. I am thankful every day that some number of people read the things that I write here, and even more appreciative that so many of you find enough value in it to respond, reply, refute or just return over time. I'm particularly thankful to the few of you whom I know have been here from the beginning
To my surprise, many of my most popular and best writings have happened in just the past year or two of my site. In my mind, I always see the peak of my site's popularity or quality having come at some fabled time in the past, but it's my sincere hope that I actually haven't done my best work yet on this site.
Thanks for reading, and thanks for the inspiration. Hopefully these archives are just the first ten years.
(Thanks to Merlin Mann for the photo.)
‘Mad Men’ and Lucky Strike: It’s Very Difficult to Keep the Line between Fact and Fiction
Am I just missing something here? There is a short piece about Linda Schupack, the advertising woman in charge of advertising Mad Men, a show about advertising, in the New Yorker. It goes: “Schupack, who has an Entertainment Marketer of the Year award from Ad Age on her windowsill, said that, as someone in the business, she’d been particularly impressed by [main character Don] Draper’s campaign for Lucky Strike tobacco (’It’s toasted’). ‘Sometimes I think, What would we have done with that assignment?’ she said.” There is no further clarification. Are they just mucking with us? Or with Miss Linda Schupack, advertising award winner?
Time, in 1938, recounting testimony of the advertising man George Washington Hill:
But the most interesting irrelevancy of the trial was the following story about the origin of the Lucky Strike slogan: “My father [Percival S. Hill, whom George succeeded in 1925] was anxious to put out the brand of Lucky Strike cigarets, and I was not willing to put it out because I was sales manager and responsible to him for the success or failure of it, and I didn’t have a reason for it. I went over to the factory one day . . . and when I got within three blocks of the factory it was very apparent to me the delicious odor and aroma of the tobacco as it passed through the toasting machines. … I said to my father, ‘There is something to that process and I cannot express it.’ He says, ‘What do you mean?’ I said, ‘He cooks it, cooks the tobacco.’ My father says, ‘That doesn’t mean anything, he cooks the tobacco, that doesn’t mean anything; there is no sense in that.’ . . . A man by the name of Gerson Brown came in the room at that same time and father turned to this fellow and he says, ‘Gerson, what do you have that is appetizing to which heat has been applied?’ And Brown says, ‘I always have toast in the morning.’ My father says, ‘That is it—It is toasted.’ And my father created the phrase that way.”
Time to tax Goldman Sachs
Why do we have a financial system?
I mean, much of its activity looks an awful lot like gambling, and gambling is not exactly a constructive endeavor. In fact, many people would call gambling destructive, which is why it is generally illegal. Why? The main problem is not that successful gamblers receive something for doing nothing and are therefore leeches on society — although that is true. The main problem is that when a society allows people to get rich for doing nothing, it encourages everyone to do nothing.
What makes Goldman Sachs et. al. so evil is that they offer vast wealth to our society’s best and brightest in exchange for spending their lives being non-productive. I want our geniuses to be proving theorems and curing cancer and developing fusion reactors, not designing algorithms to flip billions of shares in microseconds.
Once upon a time, investment banks had something to do with investment. They provided direct capital to production (the “buy side”) and introductions between capital and production (the “sell side”). Investors had to choose carefully where to put their money, because it was actually at risk. And thus did our most productive businesses obtain financing to generate new wealth for the nation and for the world.
Or perhaps this was never entirely true. “To turn $100 into $110 is work; to turn $100 million into $110 million is inevitable.”
Anyway, why do we have a financial system? To facilitate the real economy, period. And perhaps I am dim, but I do not see how day trading facilitates anything. In fact, I do not see how most of what Wall Street does facilitates anything, other than making bankers rich even as the rest of us become poor.
With global production, consumption, and employment collapsing, how could an entity that is supposed to be a mere facilitator report its largest quarterly profit in history? From April through June, what did they contribute to our society, exactly, that was worth $3.44 billion? At this rate, they will pay out $20 billion in bonuses this year. What kind of civilization responds to an economic collapse by handing over even more wealth to its financiers?
Various levels of outrage are emerging from across the political spectrum. Paul Krugman, the Wall Street Journal editorial page, Charlie Gasparino, and Sheila Bair all seem to think something is wrong here. Also Glenn Beck and Jon Stewart (fun videos; do not miss). How is that for a diverse list?
So… What do our lawmakers think?
Goldman Sachs profits hailed by lawmakers
Democrats and Republicans alike lauded Goldman Sachs on Tuesday after the company, which received taxpayer assistance last year, said its quarterly profit rose and that it was setting aside billions for employees.
“Is there a law in the United States that you can’t make profits?” Representative Paul Kanjorski, a senior Democrat on the House Financial Services Committee, asked reporters.
…
Richard Shelby, the top Republican on the Senate Banking Committee, said, “I’m not surprised. Goldman Sachs has a history of being well run and sometimes ahead of the others.”
No, Representative Kanjorski, there is no law against making profits. But there ought to be, the way Goldman does it.
If it were up to me, I would change the tax code, starting with short-term capital gains. On assets held for one day or less, I would tax capital gains at 99.9%; one week or less, 99%; one month or less, 90%. And so on. For individuals working in the finance “industry” — a misnomer, since it is pretty much the opposite of real industry — I would impose a marginal tax rate of 95% for income above $75,000.
But it is not up to me. We will be lucky if we even get a “too big to fail” tax as proposed by Ms. Bair. Our lawmakers know that the public outrage will pass within days, but the political donations from Wall Street will keep coming forever. All Goldman needs now is a little distraction, like a stock market rally… (No, I am not really that paranoid.)
As Una Pizza Closes, Why Not a Mangieri-Appleman Trade?
East Village: The food world is abuzz trying to figure out where San Francisco hot shot chef Nate Appleman will land now that he's apparently set on staying in New York. Sources say he's been taking meetings with all kinds of restaurateurs in the few days he's been here, but the one definite item on his agenda: a one night only guest chef stint at Williamsburg favorite Motorino. Kind of an unusual pick unless one remembers that his SF restaurant A16 was known for their pies and that Motorino is going to open a new branch in the space of Una Pizza space (which just closed) sometime in the next two months. A try out or just a fun diversion? Says a commenter, "Give it six weeks."
Given what kinds of offers may be coming his way, it's safe to assume even Nate Appleman doesn't know where Nate Appleman will end up. And seeing that Motorino is so successful on its own, they don't really his help or star power.
But it would be nice indeed. And considering Nick Fox just reported that departing Una Pizza pizzaiolo Anthony Mangieri has his sights set on SF, it would be pretty fair trade.
· All Nate Appleman Coverage [~E~]
· Una Pizza Napoletana Has Closed; Will Reopen As Motorino [Diner's Journal]
PAPER to Take Over Housing Works This Thursday!
Last week, Team PAPER did something that we don't do that often. We left the safe confines of our Koreatown digs and rode the 7 train out to the wilds of Long Island City. There, we sorted through racks and racks of vintage goodies at the Housing Works warehouse and picked out the best and the brightest for you, dear readers, to peruse this Thursday, July 23 for our Editors' Picks Shopping Party at Housing Works' 23rd Street boutique! All proceeds go towards Housing Works so you can feel good about yourself for buying, say, a vintage floral Ungaro dress, a Betsey Johnson frock straight out of Cher Horowitz's closet, or a fitted leather bomber jacket... Our market editors Zandile Blay and Luigi Tadini have styled the windows; Drew Elliott and Nicky Balestrieri will be throwing a retro-themed cocktail party; and DJs Andrew Andrew will be spinning some dope tunes. RSVP here. Here is all the relevant info: Where: Housing Works Gramercy Thrift Shop, 157 E. 23rd St. between Lexington and Third Avenues (subway: 6 to 23rd St.) When: Thursday, July 23 from 6 to 9 p.m. Cost: FREE Benefits: Housing Works, the largest community-based AIDS service organization in the United States. Since 1990, we have provided lifesaving services to more than 20,000 homeless and low-income New Yorkers living with HIV and AIDS. Can’t make it to the party? You can still shop some of Paper’s picks online at www.shophousingworks.com!
Instant Color Schemes
Let Yahoo pick your color scheme! Enter a word or phrase and I'll grab 5 related images from Yahoo Images, and get the 6 most prominent colors from each.
Bookmark this on Delicious - Saved by yatta to design color - More about this bookmark
T-shirt designs on cakes
Threadcakes is a contest that turns Threadless t-shirt designs into cakes. Ooh, do this one. (via waxy)
Tags: fashion food remix
MySQL: INSERT ... ON DUPLICATE KEY UPDATE
MySQL: INSERT ... ON DUPLICATE KEY UPDATE: I had no idea this existed.
Announcing the NYT API Tool
With the NYT API Tool, you can experiment with Times APIs without writing a single line of code.
Documentation Update
This week we’ll be previewing some of the new features of Movable Type 4.3 (try the Movable Type 4.3 beta). I’ll start the week off with a post on the my progress updating and improving the Movable Type documentation and Matt Jacobs, MT product manager, will be posting about other features of MT 4.3 later in the week.
Intro
In product documentation, the manual is the product. If a feature isn’t defined, it doesn’t exist as far as the user can tell. If a feature is described badly, the user will perceive the product to be a bad product. Thus, do not skimp on the documentation. Randal L. Schwartz, Perl author
Documentation should be an integral part of the development of a new feature. It should start as a Specifications document, then be used for Quality Assurance testing of the feature, and then published publicly as the Official Documentation for the feature.
Describing how a feature works provides new insight into how it could be coded better, reveals bugs, or gives inspiration to new features.
Documentation is even important to the developers who wrote it as sometimes they have totally forgotten their strategy at the time, or perhaps their experience since writing the code has provided them new insights.
Good documentation will reduce the amount of questions that are asked of our developers and provide them with more time code in peace.
MT Docs History
One of the biggest complaints we hear from Movable Type users is lack of documentation. Those who have looked under the hood know that it’s powerful, but for the majority of users documentation is where they turn when they want to find answers.
In the past, valiant efforts have been made to improve the docs, but they’ve always been halted by higher priority tasks or due to the loss of resources. Many of docs have suffered from lack of completeness or worse inaccuracy. With no official documentation guidelines or style guide to follow and documentation often being the least fun part of programming, the docs were often limited to very limited description of functionality.
Since MT4 was released, whenever possible, I’ve taken the time to add clarity and/or examples to the docs during and between various projects… and I even wrote up a POD Doc formatting guide for internal use.
We’ve always stressed the production of documentation, but true progress in bringing this work public has been hindered due to the complication of formatting docs in POD, requiring them to be checked into in the Movable Type code and then later synced to movabletype.org. Since docs were often updated directly on movabletype.org and not in the code, keeping these two separate locations manually synced was not a scalable nor desirable solution.
Movable Type 4.3 Release
So with the docs being a part-time pet project, I was happy to see that “documentation” was a feature listed for the MT 4.3 release. When I was asked me to take on the docs as my ongoing project, I was stoked!
Upon initial survey, I found that the docs was composed of 1452 total pages. Sheesh… where to begin?
Knowing that this wouldn’t be my only project and that there was a chance my priorities could change, I figured that it was important to establish a framework and style guide such that when developers have time, they can follow this guide to quickly create complete, accurate, and consistent documentation, formatted to fit in seamlessly with the rest of the documentation… thus providing a continued increase in quality over time.
Knowing that some of the 1452 pages would take 10 minutes, others would take a few days, and that I would find there were features for which docs didn’t exist, I figured I would start updating the docs with reported bugs, docs with little or no content, and those which were most visited based upon Google Analytics results.
Starting with the the 812 pages of docs for tags, modifiers, config directives, and appendices would give me a good sense of what a style guide should look like and would provide valuable insight when shifting focus to the 640 pages of guides, release notes, etc.
Current Status
So far I have:
- tested, rewrote, reformatted, consolidated, and provided basic and advanced tested examples for 76 docs pages over the course of the last month when this project began. Highlights:
- produced a documentation style guide
- written a plugin to provide the ability to link to headings within the docs (HeadingLinks plugin)
- updated various movabletype.org templates and styles to provide more context and links to define relationships between various features.
- created various utility templates to list most recently updated docs, docs with little or no content, and docs which need review from some Perl experts, etc.
- added a way for admins to note when a comment’s content has been incorporated into the main doc.
Future Plan
Once docs related to Movable Type Markup Language (template tags, tag modifiers, config directives) and other appendices are more complete overall, work will shift to developing guides to assist in the use and learning of Movable Type’s features. While writing guides, related docs will be updated as necessary to support the guides.
Currently many of the guides are grouped by user type, but there is a desire to convert the structure to a more topic-based set of guides. (This way to learn about using “assets”, it won’t first require guessing if the desired information would be categorized under Author, Designer, Administrator, or Developer docs… rather you’d find a guide called “Using Assets” which would contain everything related to assets.)
An outline of how the guides section will be architected hasn’t been defined, but some have been suggested.
You Can Help!
- Create/update a page using the style guide to help keep the docs consistent and complete.
- Submit the docs via any of the following methods:
- Submit a case in bugs.movabletype.org. Just a Title and description are necessary, the link is pre-configured to place the case in the Docs area for triage.
- Leave a comment on the page of the doc with the notes
- Edit the docs directly if you’re a community member who has been granted access to the docs install. (Leave a comment—as a native MT user—on this post if you’d like to apply for an account.)
Feel free to start anywhere in the docs. I’ve created outlines in the style guide for documenting tags, modifiers, and config directives.
Because I’m not a Perl expert (yet!) there are some docs which I’ve edited, but was unable to complete. I have tagged them with a private tag and created a couple index templates to list them. Most of the pages are stubbed out with questions placed in html comments. (Once docs are updated, the respective private tag should be removed):
@need_review- Potentially complete, but should be reviewed by a Perl expert.@need_backend_help- Need help authoring from a Perl expert.If you have any questions or feedback, please feel free to email me: Beau at Six Apart
Some thanks… to Su, Elise, Jesse Jay, and Byrne and other community members for proofing, testing, providing feedback, submitting documentation bugs, and tweeting about the updates and activity; Matt Jacobs for some templating suggestions; to Brad Choate and Mark Paschal for providing insight into the Perl logic and guidance in creating the HeadingLinks plugin; and thanks to David Jacobs for making time for this project.
Documentation Update
This week we’ll be previewing some of the new features of Movable Type 4.3 (try the Movable Type 4.3 beta). I’ll start the week off with a post on the my progress updating and improving the Movable Type documentation and Matt Jacobs, MT product manager, will be posting about other features of MT 4.3 later in the week.
Intro
In product documentation, the manual is the product. If a feature isn’t defined, it doesn’t exist as far as the user can tell. If a feature is described badly, the user will perceive the product to be a bad product. Thus, do not skimp on the documentation. Randal L. Schwartz, Perl author
Documentation should be an integral part of the development of a new feature. It should start as a Specifications document, then be used for Quality Assurance testing of the feature, and then published publicly as the Official Documentation for the feature.
Describing how a feature works provides new insight into how it could be coded better, reveals bugs, or gives inspiration to new features.
Documentation is even important to the developers who wrote it as sometimes they have totally forgotten their strategy at the time, or perhaps their experience since writing the code has provided them new insights.
Good documentation will reduce the amount of questions that are asked of our developers and provide them with more time code in peace.
MT Docs History
One of the biggest complaints we hear from Movable Type users is lack of documentation. Those who have looked under the hood know that it’s powerful, but for the majority of users documentation is where they turn when they want to find answers.
In the past, valiant efforts have been made to improve the docs, but they’ve always been halted by higher priority tasks or due to the loss of resources. Many of docs have suffered from lack of completeness or worse inaccuracy. With no official documentation guidelines or style guide to follow and documentation often being the least fun part of programming, the docs were often limited to very limited description of functionality.
Since MT4 was released, whenever possible, I’ve taken the time to add clarity and/or examples to the docs during and between various projects… and I even wrote up a POD Doc formatting guide for internal use.
We’ve always stressed the production of documentation, but true progress in bringing this work public has been hindered due to the complication of formatting docs in POD, requiring them to be checked into in the Movable Type code and then later synced to movabletype.org. Since docs were often updated directly on movabletype.org and not in the code, keeping these two separate locations manually synced was not a scalable nor desirable solution.
Movable Type 4.3 Release
So with the docs being a part-time pet project, I was happy to see that “documentation” was a feature listed for the MT 4.3 release. When I was asked me to take on the docs as my ongoing project, I was stoked!
Upon initial survey, I found that the docs was composed of 1452 total pages. Sheesh… where to begin?
Knowing that this wouldn’t be my only project and that there was a chance my priorities could change, I figured that it was important to establish a framework and style guide such that when developers have time, they can follow this guide to quickly create complete, accurate, and consistent documentation, formatted to fit in seamlessly with the rest of the documentation… thus providing a continued increase in quality over time.
Knowing that some of the 1452 pages would take 10 minutes, others would take a few days, and that I would find there were features for which docs didn’t exist, I figured I would start updating the docs with reported bugs, docs with little or no content, and those which were most visited based upon Google Analytics results.
Starting with the the 812 pages of docs for tags, modifiers, config directives, and appendices would give me a good sense of what a style guide should look like and would provide valuable insight when shifting focus to the 640 pages of guides, release notes, etc.
Current Status
So far I have:
- tested, rewrote, reformatted, consolidated, and provided basic and advanced tested examples for 76 docs pages over the course of the last month when this project began. Highlights:
- produced a documentation style guide
- written a plugin to provide the ability to link to headings within the docs (HeadingLinks plugin)
- updated various movabletype.org templates and styles to provide more context and links to define relationships between various features.
- created various utility templates to list most recently updated docs, docs with little or no content, and docs which need review from some Perl experts, etc.
- added a way for admins to note when a comment’s content has been incorporated into the main doc.
Future Plan
Once docs related to Movable Type Markup Language (template tags, tag modifiers, config directives) and other appendices are more complete overall, work will shift to developing guides to assist in the use and learning of Movable Type’s features. While writing guides, related docs will be updated as necessary to support the guides.
Currently many of the guides are grouped by user type, but there is a desire to convert the structure to a more topic-based set of guides. (This way to learn about using “assets”, it won’t first require guessing if the desired information would be categorized under Author, Designer, Administrator, or Developer docs… rather you’d find a guide called “Using Assets” which would contain everything related to assets.)
An outline of how the guides section will be architected hasn’t been defined, but some have been suggested.
You Can Help!
- Create/update a page using the style guide to help keep the docs consistent and complete.
- Submit the docs via any of the following methods:
- Submit a case in bugs.movabletype.org. Just a Title and description are necessary, the link is pre-configured to place the case in the Docs area for triage.
- Leave a comment on the page of the doc with the notes
- Edit the docs directly if you’re a community member who has been granted access to the docs install. (Leave a comment—as a native MT user—on this post if you’d like to apply for an account.)
Feel free to start anywhere in the docs. I’ve created outlines in the style guide for documenting tags, modifiers, and config directives.
Because I’m not a Perl expert (yet!) there are some docs which I’ve edited, but was unable to complete. I have tagged them with a private tag and created a couple index templates to list them. Most of the pages are stubbed out with questions placed in html comments. (Once docs are updated, the respective private tag should be removed):
@need_review- Potentially complete, but should be reviewed by a Perl expert.@need_backend_help- Need help authoring from a Perl expert.If you have any questions or feedback, please feel free to email me: Beau at Six Apart
Some thanks… to Su, Elise, Jesse Jay, and Byrne and other community members for proofing, testing, providing feedback, submitting documentation bugs, and tweeting about the updates and activity; Matt Jacobs for some templating suggestions; to Brad Choate and Mark Paschal for providing insight into the Perl logic and guidance in creating the HeadingLinks plugin; and thanks to David Jacobs for making time for this project.
Joining Kickstarter
Some news: I'm proud to announce that I've taken the CTO role at Kickstarter, the Brooklyn-based crowdfunding startup I've mentioned here before. Yay!
I've acted a board member for over a year, helping find the development team and providing some guidance on tech, design, and community issues. And in the last year, watching the site evolve was an amazing experience, from an idea to a website with the potential to change the way things are made.
Since our launch ten weeks ago, over $250,000 has been pledged to make everything from books, magazines, albums (and album reissues), plays, films, art projects, zombie iPhone apps, and more. (Not to mention, my own Kind of Bloop album.) And keep in mind, the site's still invite-only!
Getting people to give you money is tricky, but I think we've hit on a formula for success:
- All-or-nothing. Projects are only successful if they reach the fundraising goal by the deadline, otherwise nobody pays. This limits risk for both backers and project creators, who don't have to worry about committing money and time to a failed project.
- Rewards. We strongly emphasize the importance of crafting good rewards, which makes Kickstarter more like commerce than altruism. We support multiple tiers of rewards from $1 to $10,000, limits for each, and tools for creators to contact each tier group independently.
- Publishing. A simple and powerful reward is access to exclusive updates during a project's funding and development, creating a powerful connection between the audience and project. As a result, we offer publishing tools for public or private updates, including hosted media and update notifications.
These mechanisms and constraints allow Kickstarter to not just fund projects, but test ideas, engage with an audience, and pre-sell your work without risk.
Earlier this month, I spoke at the Guardian Activate Summit in London about the power of play and applying game mechanics to non-games — difficult problems like environmental change, political activism, and fundraising. Kickstarter turns fundraising into a social game, where people have to work together within a time limit to reach a common goal. Already, we're seeing that projects develop their own viral momentum... Once a project hits 25% of its goal, success is almost guaranteed. (94% of projects that hit that mark eventually hit their goal.)
I'm looking forward to pushing Kickstarter further in that direction, and building a platform that's flexible enough to be used by more than just artists trying to raising money. I'd love to see more people use Kickstarter for commissioned works like Kind of Bloop, collecting the money to pay someone to make or do something you want to exist. Or anywhere you need to gauge market demand, like throwing parties without the risk of losing your shirt in ticket sales.
Next month, we'll be opening the site up to anyone who wants to make a project — and that's when things get really interesting. In the meantime, if you have a good idea, get in touch or leave a comment and I'll hook you up. Thanks!
NYPL: 1908
The New York Public Library under construction circa 1908, some six years after groundbreaking and three years before it finally opened. View full size.
Videos: A Preview of Amanda Hesser's "Food 52" Website, Plus a Tour of Her Kitchen
In May, there was a blip on the radar that former New York Times Magazine food editor (and current Recipe Redux contributor) Amanda Hesser—along with food writer and recipe-tester Merrill Stubbs—would be launching a new site called Food 52.
Looks like they're beta-testing now—and that you can sign up for an invitation once it launches: Food52.com.
But what really caught our eye today is that Hesser and Stubbs seem to have quietly started uploading to a Vimeo account, which is full of what appear to be test videos—along with a couple great nuggets: an introduction to the Food 52 concept, and a video tour of Amanda Hesser's envy-inducing kitchen—complete with the now-customary refrigerator-baring. Watch both, after the jump.
An Intro to the Food 52 Concept
Here's the way Food 52 works: There are 52 weeks in a year, and each week we're going to select categories that go into a cookbook. And then you'll send in recipes that fit those cateogries. We'll select the best ones and prepare them each week. Then, you'll choose among them, and the winner will go into the cookbook.
A Tour of Amanda Hesser's Kitchen
Nice touches include:
- A custom cutting-board countertop that's sized to Hesser's height—with a pullout trash drawer just beneath it that she can scrape scraps into
- A pantry that's more reminiscent of library stacks—complete with ladder to access top shelves
- A photo of the "Tripe Lady," a woman whose blouse sleeves are made of tripe
Oh, and there's the customary refrigerator tour.
Apollo 11 landing on TV as it aired 40 years ago
Inspired by the ApolloPlus40 Twitter account and We Choose the Moon, both of which are tracking the Apollo 11 mission as it happened 40 years ago, I've built a page where you can watch the CBS News coverage of Walter Cronkite reporting on the Moon landing and the first moon walk, 40 years to the second after it originally happened.
Just leave this page open in your browser and at the appointed times (schedule is below), the broadcast will begin (no manual page refresh necessary).
Schedule:
Moon landing broacast start: 4:10:30 pm EDT on July 20
Moon landing shown: 4:17:40 pm EDT
Moon landing broacast end: 4:20:15 pm EDT
Moon walk broadcast start: 10:51:27 pm EDT
First step on Moon: 10:56:15 pm EDT
Nixon speaks to the Eagle crew: approx 11:51:30 pm EDT
Moon walk broadcast end: 12:00:30 pm EDT on July 21If you've never seen this coverage, I urge you to watch at least the landing segment (~10 min.) and the first 10-20 minutes of the Moon walk. I hope that with the old time TV display and poor YouTube quality, you get a small sense of how someone 40 years ago might have experienced it. I've watched the whole thing a couple of times while putting this together and I'm struck by two things: 1) how it's almost more amazing that hundreds of millions of people watched the first Moon walk *live* on TV than it is that they got to the Moon in the first place, and 2) that pretty much the sole purpose of the Apollo 11 Moon walk was to photograph it and broadcast it live back to Earth.
Thanks to Meg for her JS help...any errors or sloppy code are mine. Please note that schedule times are approximate, based on your computer's clock, and that the syncing of the videos might not be perfect. You need to have JS and Flash 8+ to view. This is just like real TV...if you miss the appointed time, there's no rewind or anything...the video is playing "live". I have not done extensive browser testing so it may not work perfectly in your browser. Bug reports are welcome and I will try to fix things as they crop up. If you run into any problems, just reload the page. To ensure that you have the latest (hopefully bug-free) version before the broadcast begins, reload the page. Other than that, if you leave it open, the broadcast will happen automatically.
If you like this, tell your pals on Twitter.
Tags: Apollo Apollo 11 Moon space TV waltercronkite
Dressing the Part
Having a career in fashion and magazines has always meant that I have not had to follow many of the stricter dress code rules that some of my female friends have had to over the course of their careers. Of course, we've got our own codes in this business, but that's a different matter.
I remember the first summer we all lived in NYC after college and the envy I witnessed in the eyes of my friends heading off to their jobs at Goldman or McKinsey, their looks completed with panty hose and closed toed shoes. I was in a skirt (sans hose, of course) and sandals.
I thought of this when reading Robin Givhan's piece in the yesterday's Washington Post on the sartorial choices of Sonia Sotomayor during last week's Senate Judiciary Committee hearings.
Sponsored Topics: Sonia Sotomayor - United States Senate Committee on the Judiciary - Washington Post - Robin Givhan - United States
What's Lovely in the UK!
Lovely (and polite) prose
Lovely Bread
Lovely Eggs
Apple and RIM Outsmart the Phone Market
Sara Silver, reporting for the WSJ:
[Apple and RIM] accounted for only 3% of all cellphones sold in the world last year but 35% of operating profits, according to Deutsche Bank analyst Brian Modoff. The disparity will become even starker this year when, he estimates, the two will take 5% of the market in unit terms but 58% of total operating profits.
The graphs are striking. This is the same route Apple has chosen with the Mac: an emphasis on profit share rather than unit sale share.
Flicked Off: Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince
Three whirling rockets of black smoke destroy a small and apparently chintzy pedestrian foot bridge in London, in the world’s least dramatic terrorist attack, a terrorist attack on par with arsoning a Cinnabon franchise in Racine, Wisconsin, and apparently some sort of war is on. We never find out who these things/people/smoke-clouds are but one of them appears to be Helena Bonham Carter, the best Bonham since John Henry, and she is truly wonderful and apparently evil. The rest of the movie is devoted to an abstract series of nightmare impressions of adolescence. There are trains full of violence, a number of houses that burst into flames, a series of heavily sexualized teenage couplings both induced and natural, a series of impotent and ethereal father figures and the frequent consumption of beverages both alcoholic and magical, some of both of which are deadly.
For those in the know, Harry Potter is about a young boy with dead parents in a school for magical children. There is always trouble there, and we don’t know why: apparently there is a bad person, never seen, who makes bad things happen. Like a French film from the 60s, the whole thing takes place in a prolonged dream-like state; one of those dreams where people appear and tell you that you must, must do something but you can’t quite figure out why and then you try to do what they are telling you to do but midway through it all goes wrong in the blackest, most horrifying way, and then before you have a chance to clean that up, someone else is telling you to do something, something equally important and dreadful.
Adolescence is a nightmare, and in the previous Harry Potter film, which I think was the 14th in the series, we were treated to the camera’s oddly male-on-male gaze of Potter himself, shirtless, with little hairs around his nipples, luxuriously baring a newly manly armpit. Now Harry is picking up waitresses and tossing back beers. But while he acts like a grown-up man, his life is still disturbingly early-teen. Also as a part of growing up, he must become a social manipulator, and pretend to befriend people for political reasons. Meanwhile he is also being told that he is Neo from The Matrix.
Like the furtive sexual couplings that appear and disappear—a couple necks in a dark doorway, right by a group of their friends; a girl with a crush, finding out her intended is now with another girl, creates and flings birds at him, and the birds dissolve into little puffs of dead feathers—the movie refuses to climax. It withholds and stretches like a taffy, all objectives and horrors flying past heedlessly, and therefore is really one of the best depictions of adolescence going. Harry Potter doesn’t even know how to kiss yet, he extrudes his lips like tentacles. What was it all about? I have no idea, the movie stretches out and off and eventually someone important dies, though you don’t even believe they are permanently dead, because in dreams everything is reversible.
It is very pleasant to watch all this and you will be reminded of being young, uncertain and horny. Really never has there been a movie with less explication! It is sort of wonderful and relaxing to know and understand very little while pretty and strange events race by.
Quote: Jerry Jokes about Team’s Medical Staff
Gary Sheffield missed his second straight game yesterday with a cramp in his right hamstring.
In case you missed it, on Saturday, Manuel joked with reporters saying, ‘They’re calling it cramps… so, surgery on Thursday.’
In the New York Post, Bart Hubbuch later wrote:
“Manuel then pleaded twice - apparently without success – with SNY’s in-house reporter, Kevin Burkhardt, not to run the footage… Manuel was making light of the Mets’ habit, particularly this season, of minimizing injuries that turn out to be much more serious. It is an especially touchy subject with team management, so Manuel is sure to hear about it.”
…ouch, jerry… i mean, it’s a funny joke, and i’m sure every one who reads MetsBlog has made a similar one… but, wow… from what i can tell, jerry’s bosses do not like being made to look foolish, and i am near certain his comment rubbed at least two or three people the wrong way…
Manuel later said he hopes to see Sheffield back in the starting lineup either Monday or Tuesday in Washington, DC.
Explore the moon in Google Earth
Posted by Anousheh Ansari, Trustee, X PRIZE Foundation, and first female private space explorer
[From time to time we invite guests to blog about initiatives of interest, and are very pleased to have Anousheh Ansari join us here. – Ed.]
Ever since I was a young girl, it has been a dream of mine to travel into space. In September of 2006, I was fortunate enough to make that dream a reality — I took off from the launch pad in Baikonur bound for the International Space Station and became the world's first private female space tourist. Since then, it's been my mission to help as many people as possible think ambitiously about ways to push the boundaries of exploration, both here on Earth and beyond. As a trustee of the X PRIZE Foundation, and the sponsor of the Ansari X PRIZE, I support Google's goal of opening up space through projects like the Google Lunar X PRIZE, which serve to educate the public about the global benefits of space exploration.
That's why I'm so excited about the release of Moon in Google Earth, which is launching today at the Newseum in Washington D.C. This tool will make it easier for millions of people to learn about space, our moon and some of the most significant and dazzling discoveries humanity has accomplished together. Moon in Google Earth enables you to explore lunar imagery as well as informational content about the Apollo landing sites, panoramic images shot by the Apollo astronauts, narrated tours and much more. I believe that this educational tool is a critical step into the future, a way to both develop the dreams of young people globally, and inspire new audacious goals.
With Google Earth, young explorers around the world can bounce around the galaxy in Sky, fly to Mars and now visit the moon from wherever they may be. To learn more watch the video below or visit the Lat Long Blog. Finally, outer space doesn't seem so far away anymore.
Hearst on the Court
William Randolph Hearst Sr. on the court.
(via life magazine archives)
A Stern Edit of Sarah Palin’s Resignation Speech
Ah, in this modern self-editing age, who says editors aren’t useful?
Financial innovation
In my blog entry this morning about Robert Shiller and his bonkers defense of subprime mortgages, I made an en passant reference to financial innovation being, net-net, a bad thing. I didn't go into too much detail, because it wasn't all that relevant to the point at hand, and because, as Sean Matthews pointed out, this question has been debated in the blogosphere in some depth in the recent past.
But Tyler Cowen picked up on the line, and wrote:
I can understand that particular financial innovations might be bad, but financial innovation overall? Surely this claim was false in years 1200, 1900, and also 1950. (Of course you'll find very harmful financial explosions between those years and the current day but still on net you'll take the progress.) If the U.S. economy resumes growing at an average rate of about two percent a year, eventually our economy will look very, very different than it does today. It's hard for me to see running the economy of 2100 with the banking system of…what is the nostalgic year? 1992? 1957?
We'll need more than better ATMs, which is not to say we need approve of every step along the way.
I think that the case for the positive effects of financial innovation is yes pretty strong if you roll back the clock to 1200 or 1900 or 1950. But over the past 25 years or so, the claim is much harder to make stick.
As for banking systems, Tyler I think concedes that there's an important distinction which needs to be made here. On the one hand, there's what you might generally lump into back-office functions — the distribution, clearing, and settlement of exchange. ATMs, charge cards, debit cards, PayPal, online banking, m-banking, etc all fall into this bucket, and advances here are often (although not always) a good thing.
Then there's the more purely financial innovation. There are good things here too — fractional reserve banking, factoring, common-stock limited-liability companies, tradable fungible bonds, stock-market index funds, that sort of thing. But on this front I think the low-hanging fruit was plucked decades if not centuries ago, and that we've long since entered a world of diminishing returns when it comes to the positive developments. Meanwhile, the negative developments, from portfolio insurance to CDO-squareds, have been arriving at an ever-accelerating pace.
I agree with Justin Fox:
I'm with Tyler in that I'd rather have today's financial system, however flawed it is, than the financial system of 1200. But at the same time, an estimated 97.3% of all financial innovations (I just made that up, but it seems about right) are just new ways to fleece customers or hide risk, and all major financial crises have been associated with some financial innovation or another.
The point is that we're not in 1200, or 1900, or even 1950. And if you look at how fast the US economy managed to grow in the 50s and 60s without the benefit of Black-Scholes or the Gaussian copula function — or, for that matter, how fast the Chinese economy has grown of late with very strict fetters on financial activities — it looks very much as though most of the financial innovation in recent decades constitutes a history of increasingly-desperate attempts to eke out returns in the context of a naturally-slowing economy. And that history, I think, is doomed to failure.
So yes, in 2100 I'm sure that checks and credit cards — hell, maybe even cash, too — are going to be a thing of the past. But all that falls under the general rubric of “better ATMs”. Are we going to need more than that to run the 22nd-Century economy? I'm not convinced. And even if we do, there's no reason why we can't get there from here slowly, and with circumspection.
Printed Blogs Are the Future of Publishing. Again. [Print Is Dead]
A Colorado start-up called Printcasting sees the future of journalism and it is this: People putting together their own magazines featuring their own blog posts and/or posts from other blogs as well as other newspaper and magazine articles. Gross.
Reports the New York Times:
Printcasting, which is backed by an $837,000 grant from the Knight Foundation's program to find digital models for local news, hopes to attract new readers and advertisers to print publications. Dan Pacheco, the senior manager of digital products at The Bakersfield Californian newspaper, who founded the start-up, says reducing the costs of producing magazines is the way to bring them back. (He has not quit his day job and works remotely from Colorado.)
Would-be publishers choose a name and template for their paper on the Printcasting Web site. Then they can fill it with articles they have uploaded to the site or search topic feeds, like food or travel, to find articles that others bloggers or newspapers have uploaded.
Advertisers also create ads on the site and choose which magazines they appear in, without the help of sales staff. All ads start at $10 an issue (no matter how many copies are printed), but each publisher can choose to charge more than that for their publication. Printcasting keeps 10 percent of any ad revenue and gives 30 percent to the writers and 60 percent to the publishers.
Didn't The Printed Blog, which was supposed to revolutionize publishing, try doing basically the same thing? This seems like just another bad idea destined to fail.
A Path to Magazine Editor and Publisher [New York Times]
July 19, 2009
Palin's Resignation: The Edited Version
Just how poorly constructed was Sarah Palin’s good-bye speech? V.F. editor Wayne Lawson whips it into publishable shape, with a lot of help from his red pencil.
Updates will continue to be slow for Double-Tongued
My family and I are in the process of moving ourselves and our belongings from New York City to the San Francisco Bay area—completely across North America—so updates will continue to be sporadic on this web site. Stay subscribed, though, because they will resume their previous vigor in just a couple of weeks.
Will Shortz
Will Shortz: This will likely be good: Will Shortz, the NY Times crossword puzzle editor, is answering questions this week.
Little does Uri know that much like Twitter, the Rocketboom...
Little does Uri know that much like Twitter, the Rocketboom business model was once stolen and presented for the world to see.
Wardere: “Know Your Meme: Wardere” knowyourmeme:...
Wardere: “Know Your Meme: Wardere”
knowyourmeme: Youtube user and Boxxy-enthusiast Wardere spoofs Know Your Meme in a declaration of his non-meme status.
Thanks for the love, Wardere!
Um, wow.
He didn't ask a lot of questions
ZOMG I’m so nervous about my first day of work tomorrow with a new company and I hope I don’t screw up and that I impress everybody and ZOMG what if they don’t like me and ZOMG what if I can’t do what they think I can do and ZOMG I don’t even know why they wanted me and ZOMG it’s a huge opportunity and ZOMG I really hope they’re not reading this.Your first task is to find a place to put your desk in our small Manhattan office that’s already full, then assemble it using only your bare hands, a spoon, and a MetroCard. Then you need to pick up your Mac Pro and 30” monitor at the glass Apple Store and carry it back to our office without using any vehicles. Finally, you need to sign into FogBugz and resolve a small quantity of tickets (about 1400) that I haven’t been able to get to over the last few months, most of which will require live code changes. When doing that, don’t write any bugs, because you’ll break the site and cause hundreds of errors per second. Oh, and you should comment anything you see that’s not documented, which will be most of it. That should take you most of the morning. After a big pasta lunch every Monday, we have an all-team meeting that usually only lasts a few hours so we can create the action items and deliverables for the week and make sure we’ve accounted for all of our hours on the timesheets.
We start at 6 AM every day and we have a strict suit, jacket, and tie dress code. We just dressed down when you visited because we heard that’s how people dressed in Florida and we wanted to ease you into city life slowly. Oh, and we’re all members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints and therefore we do not allow coffee in the office.
Can’t wait to see you bright and early tomorrow morning!
In Season: Basil
The thing about basil is that once it gets going, you suddenly have way more than you know what to do with. Sure, there's insalata caprese or pasta caprese or anything caprese, but I have to admit I get a little bored. That classic combination is great—just not every day of summer. I've rounded up some recipes featuring basil used in alternative ways, whether it be as an infusion, in a fresh pasta dough, or simply featured in a chilled martini to sip on the porch. Given half a chance, basil can truly shine when it's not with its BFFs tomato and mozzarella.
Basil Recipes
- Watermelon-Basil Martinis and Mint Juleps
- Genovese Minestrone
- Pear, Basil, and Pecorino Toscano Salad
- Flat Pasta with Rock Shrimp and Zucchini
- Basil-Infused Tuna with Soy Vinaigrette
- Preserved Lemon Semifreddo with Basil Syrup
- Pesto Tips and Recipes
What's your best basil recipe?
A New Kind Of Cinema
This project synthesizes my interests in technology, art and media: Testing simples rules, and using a single image as an point of inspiration, a movie-creating program will generate a film that is chosen out of a tested batch of 1000s of randomly generated films. Mathematica is used to create short animations (directly exported as AVI or QuickTime files) by attempting to generate a two-dimensionsal form that matches an inputted image; afterwhich, the 'approximated' form seamlessly evolves into the target image. Forms are generated from the evolution of a single black cell in order to approximate a target image. This project streamlines the creation of a seamless animation based upon the input of an image and a specified search size that is to be explored. Fourier and Compression methods are used as a metric in order to select the rule which generates a form that is most similar to a target image's Fourier transform and compression size. After selecting an optimized rule, a complete animation is generated, which begins with a single black cell and ends with the target image. http://knightleap.com/NKSposterIlfeld.pdf
Remember, it’s just a hobby…
Buy Donruss products. It’s that simple.
Lately it seems as if The Hobby is full of nothing but angry, bitter collectors. The sad truth is that the industry has fallen on hard times and companies are doing anything and everything they can to keep collecting alive.
When you fire that angry message on a card forum about Goodwin Champions inserting pieces of the Titanic, remember Topps is just as guilty of such gimmicks. Did you forget the DNA relic of the Bigfoot and a certified autograph of the Invisible Man?
This hobby is meant to be enjoyed. No one is forcing you to buy Upper Deck or Topps products, right? If you are really that miserable it’s better for your health and the rest of the collecting community to just walk away. No hobby should upset you that much.
If you are constantly complaining about non-sports figures in your baseball product I would recommend Donruss’ 2008 baseball line-up. It was truly the only gimmick-free brand you could find and while they were not perfect by any means, they kept it simple and for many that worked extremely well.
Time to post my angry rant on Beckett...
Dave Chappelle Surprise Show, Live In Portland (video)
Dave Chappelle Live In Portland (video) Some so-so quality video of Dave Chappelle doing a surprise show in Portland. More info here via differentkitchen. Dave Chappelle Live In Portland (video)
‘District 9’ Trailer 2 HD A scifi film about...
A scifi film about immigration set in South Africa. (How brilliant is that?) It looks like District-9 is going to be Neill Bomkamp’s realization of his ‘Alive in Joburg’ short with an action movie storyline. I can’t wait.
Also, watching this makes me wish Chris Cunningham would direct feature films.
Eye teeth? Seriously? PLEASE DON'T LOOK AT ME.
Blind man sees after having a tooth implanted into his eye.
During the procedure, a minute section of a patient's tooth is removed, reshaped and chiselled through to grip the man-made lens which is then placed in its core.It is implanted under an eyelid where it becomes covered in tissue.
The process requires a living tooth as an implant because doctors suggest there are chances the eye would reject a plastic equivalent.
So a canine - which is the best option due to its shape and size - was taken out of Mr Jones' mouth.
A patch of skin is then taken from the inside of the cheek and placed in the eye for two months, where it gradually acquires its own blood supply.
The tooth segment is finally transplanted into the eye socket. The flap of grafted skin is then partially lifted from the eye and placed over its new sturdy base.
Finally, surgeons cut a hole in the grafted cornea to let light through.
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