The Social Media Guru
Shared by sippey[YouTube Video]
I'm not sure what I love more: this video, or the xtranormal (dot COM!) tool they used to make it.Genius.
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October 3, 2009
youngmanhattanite: spiers: I’m a little biased because I dated Peter a long time ago and I think...
I’m a little biased because I dated Peter a long time ago and I think he’s a good guy, but I’m sure the oil book will be excellent. His previous book, LOVE THY NEIGHBOR, was about the war in Bosnia and it’s fantastic. I still recommend it to people.
See, I thought you dated Peter Maas.
Har.
@boyfriend self-identifies as “old”. Good enough!
Kindle trial at Princeton unsuccessful
Kindle trial at Princeton unsuccessful.
This should surprise no one. I like my Kindle(s) probably more than anyone, but I just can’t imagine using it for any serious, university-level academic effort. To put it simply, at this point the Kindle is good for one thing, and one thing only: reading words in a linear fashion. (Oh, and it’s great for that one thing.) I hope that never changes.
Genius.
Genius.
The Daily Drop Cap
New project from illustrator Jessica Hische. “Each day, a new hand-crafted decorative initial cap will be posted for your enjoyment and for the beautification of blog posts everywhere.” Here’s my favorite so far.
Random Artwork/Justseeds Interview
I just realized that this nice group interview Milwaukee artist Brandon Bauer, creater of the Random Artwork blog, did with a bunch of us in Justseeds never got reposted here. So here it is. And check out Brandon's site, and the interview with images, HERE:
What is Justseeds?
Dylan: Justseeds is a Marxist-Leninist cadre of avant-garde artists who use fine art to build the dictatorship of the proletariat.Nicolas: Justseeds is a motley crew of anarchists, punks, and rabble-rousers who oppose people who work in institutions.
Shaun: Justseeds would win in a snowball fight with the Beehive Collective because we hide rocks inside our snowballs and pretty much play dirty all around.
Talk about the history of Justseeds, how did it get started, how did you all get involved, how did it become the cooperative it is today?
Nicolas: Josh started it in the late 1990s. Three years ago, he invited his friends to turn it into a collective.Shaun: I became familiar with Justseeds and most of the people involved through meeting them at the Allied Media Conference, which in it’s earlier incarnations was the Underground Publishing Conference. I met Josh there, and a lot of others, and the networks and projects were already blossoming. I was in college in Tennessee and didn’t know anyone else who was even interested in making this kind of work, and suddenly I found a cross-US growing peer group to share ideas and work with… eight or nine years and several collaborations later and I’m in a working cooperative with many of the same folks, plus some that I still haven’t met but can’t wait to meet.
Dylan: Weird connections across time and space. Met Josh and Erik at UPC. Favi came and stayed with me. Nicolas, also at UPC. I met Chuy and Melanie thorugh Favi. I stayed at Meredith’s house in Providence when Nicolas, Josh and I spoke there. I still am more of a fan of thinking of us as a collective, as opposed to a cooperative. The cooperative focuses on the sale of prints, which I find the least exciting aspect of Justseeds- although it raises money to do some super rad projects.
Colin: I learned about Justseeds and met a bunch of folks at the AMC/Underground Publishing Conference as well, and through participating in the Paper Politics and Stencil Pirates exhibitions that Josh was organizing. The cooperative seemed to develop organically where a lot of us began working together and helping out with different projects we were involved in.
Justseeds states that as part of its reason for being is to support social movements, what social movements do you support, in what capacity, and have you found these movements open to working with artists?
Dylan: In some ways, I think supporting may be an inadequate way of thinking of our role. In fact, Justseeds is a social movement that is also a part of various other social movements. As a collective of twenty-ish artists, we use our art in a variety of different contexts. I am active is certain movements, while so are other artists. There is often overlap, but not always. That is what is so exciting about this social investigatory project.Nicolas: One of our efforts has been to align ourselves with the movement to counter the prison industrial complex. We created 100 portfolios of prints that addressed prison issues called Voices From Outside, and we donated over 40 of them to groups across the country. We also included a CD-R of copyright free graphics of all the images in the portfolio, plus the prison-related images from Reproduce and Revolt- a book that was co-edited by Favianna and Josh. To date, the portfolios have been used in a number of ways. Exhibitions have been staged to bring more attention to the movement, graphics have found their way onto flyers and periodicals, and some organizations who received the portfolio auctioned theirs off as a way of fund raising. Most importantly, to me at least, I think the portfolio reasserted to these groups the need to use art, graphics, and creative resistance in their work, and for us, it reasserted the need to work more directly within social movements.
Justseeds describes itself as a “Radical Artists’ Cooperative”- how do you see what you do as radical? Why is that definition important?
Josh: Only some of our material uses the term “radical.” Personally I’d rather not use it and question it’s usefulness. I think it is important that we are socially-engaged, and attempt to use culture to both express our individual opinions about the world as well as collectively define what we would like to change and steps for how to do that. I’m not sure that’s radical, or that we all even have a common definition of what “radical” means.Roger: It’s difficult to find one word that fits into that three-word grouping that conveys the spirit of how we are as a group or as individuals. We’ve had some tongue-in-cheek suggestions like “concerned artist’s cooperative”, and the jokes just make the failure of “radical” as a descriptor all the more obvious. It’s nice and short, and works for now. It trips off the tongue in a way that “art cooperative pointing in a different direction” doesn’t. Perhaps “dissident” is the word we’re looking for, a perspective on the state of the world that eschews the lies we tell ourselves to stay comfortable.
Dylan: I think of radical as a double signifier, emerging from its usage as in 1: connected to the basic make-up of something, as well as in 2: favoring fundamental social change. This nuanced naming, similar to the complex meaning of Justseeds, points to the very dialectic nature of Justseeds as a collective. Mujeres Creando, the Bolivian anrcho-feminist collective argue that ‘there has never been a radical social movement, at least that which makes us happy, that has not also been creative.’
Your recent exhibition “Which Side Are You On?” at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Union Art Gallery seems to be a huge step forward as a collaborative exhibition from the other exhibitions you have put together. For example, your collaborative exhibition at Space 1026 in Philly seemed to really be about the print-based work of Justseeds while incorporating installation elements, but this current exhibition really does seem to be about the collaborative conception and realization. How was this exhibition conceived, how was it organized, and how do you feel about the outcome?
Dylan: Working alongside and in dialogue. Sometimes successfully, sometimes ineffectively. We held conference calls, uploaded PDF’s to our intranet site and engaged in dialogue in a variety of ways.Colin: We spent a lot of time doing preliminary work online and over the phone, which helped to come up with a theme and ideas for sculptural objects. After that the most effective visioning was done as a group face to face in the space the Saturday before the opening. I immensely enjoy these collaborative endeavors, and feel very at home among a bunch of folks running around it different directions and banging on things, maybe it is because I am used to this organized chaos growing up doing electrical work, where there are tons of folks using all kinds of power tools in tight spaces. The organized chaos of a Justseeds installation seems to parallel how I live my life as well.
Kevin: There has been a lot of 3-D installation activity in many artistic communities that we intersect with. Graffiti and street art moving into galleries has offered many of our contemporaries the opportunity to fabricate environments and atmospheres. It is a manner of contextualizing whatever work is on display.
In the exhibition “Which Side Are You On?” you brought the street and street art methods inside of the gallery, how do you feel this effects the work, and do you feel that it changes the relationship of the work to the audience as opposed to the work of the cooperative found directly on the street?
Josh: I think bringing the process of working on the street into the gallery can be interesting, but even in this show I think we depended too much on including the same work we would in the street in the exhibition. It made some sense because by building a highway in the gallery, we constructed a simulation of the street, but in the future I’d prefer to be more conscious about the graffiti and street art elements we include. The street and the gallery are different venues with different potential audiences. I think they need to each have their own unique visual strategies.Roger: I spent some time on the last day of the install detourning our printed matter, cutting it up and pasting it onto the underpass pillars in different contexts. I was mostly trying to have a little fun with our materials, but it also seemed to stretch the meaning and purpose of those materials in different directions. That’s sort of a microcosmic version of what we were doing with the installation as a whole, using methods out of their contexts to convey different bodies of information, to tell different jokes and make different points. We were using both the official and unofficial visual languages of the street (signage versus graffiti/wheatpasting) to say what we wanted to say; I thought it made the work in the space fit together very well.
Dylan: Context, context, context. Shifting the context of the work, also shifted their signification. Operating inside a gallery space, even one at a public university, mediates the work in a way that often times runs against the normal modus operandi of Justseeds. In many ways, though, the work may also function successfully in a gallery space. I find the gallery much more exciting than the internet.
Is large scale installation a form you see the cooperative pursuing further, and if so how do you see this affecting the mission of the cooperative by working more directly within the sphere of institutional or gallery art rather than on the street or specifically with the movements you support?
Dylan: I envision us working in this style.Josh: If the opportunities arise, it seems likely that at least a portion of the group will continue to do gallery/institutional installations. I don’t think they mutually exclusive with our individual print work, street work, or social movement work, and can be intertwined and simultaneously pursued. When ALL we are doing is installations in rarefied galleries that few people ever see, then come back and hit me over the head with it.
Nicolas: I hope that more installation opportunities come our way. They are great challenges and really solidify the bonds within the collective. I’d like to see us do one on the exterior of a building- a collective mural, or spend a few days all working on trains, or better yet, a border wall.
The Shepherd Express in Milwaukee recently ran a review of the exhibition under the title “Apathy’s Ugly Twin” that criticizes the exhibition for being too all over the place in regard to the issues you address, and in a backhanded way states that the exhibition is filled with “the noisy and all-too-earnest mass of rebellious statements targeted indiscriminately at ready-made causes”… How would you like to respond to that kind of criticism?
Roger: The world is crammed full of humans who all want to say something. If you tune out the sound of individual voices you just get a kind of roar. If those humans are angry the roar will be louder and more completely inchoate (I presume). That’s the sound of the future. If you’re uncomfortable with the sound of seven billion screaming bundles of righteousness telling you their opinion with voice, knife, gun, and art installation, you might consider a relocation to a more peaceful and less humanized part of the solar system. “Ready-made causes” makes it sound as if we’re performing lite dramas on the Holodeck. Shit’s all fucked up, you know? We’ve got something to say about it, just like everybody else. I don’t think we were all over the place with that installation. After all, like the title says, it’s about trying to figure out where you stand.Nicolas: That review was basically an attack and it was grade-school journalism. Our show at the Union Art Gallery had the largest turn out for an opening in the history of the gallery so her views were counter to how most people felt about it. Plus, the point of activist art is to take a stand. And the point of the installation was to experiment within a gallery space and work collectively on a project for six days. The best way to understand Justseeds is to look at the entire body of work that we have done and then spend time looking at the individual artists and the other projects that they have been involved with. Their is no simple way of describing what we do or who we are.
Who are your influences- artistic, activist, or otherwise?
Dylan: Frantz Fanon and Howard Adams and Carlos Cortéz Koyokuikatl!!!Nicolas: The simplest answer is to look at the Celebrate People’s History poster project.
What does the cooperative have planned for the future?
Dylan: We are beginning to put together a Justseeds’ journal.Josh: We are working on a 2009 print portfolio loosely organized around the themes of resource extraction, climate change, environmental justice and class struggle. We are working on a group book project with Microcosm Publishers which will illustrate and highlight important social justice fighters from the Americas. We have a number of smaller scale exhibitions of our prints in the works, we are putting together our first printed sales catalog of our work, and as individuals most of us have dozens of projects in the works.
Nicolas: In 2009, I imagine their will be a steady output of new prints on the site, a very active blog, a new portfolio project, group shows, a journal, workshops, talks, and an assortment of new roads to follow. The nice thing about working with twenty-plus people is that there will be no shortage of ideas or opportunities.
Are there any upcoming projects by any of the individual member of the cooperative you would like to talk about?
Dylan: I am presently engaged heavily in writing and organizing projects. Primarily, I am working on a book about Indigenous anti-colonialism in Chicana/o art. I recently curated an exhibition on visual resistance in Oaxaca (’In the Name of the Blood Shed‘). I am hoping to put together a catalogue for that show. I am also completing a couple of book chapters on Indigenous anti-colonial art and an article on sneakers as radical discourse (all forthcoming in the next year). This summer, I am participating with a bunch of other Native art historians on Vision Project at the Institute for American Indian Arts, while with Favianna I’ve been invited to be a mentor artist next summer at Emerging Indigenous Voices in Hawai’i. Lot’s of other shit in the works, but still fomenting.Josh: I’m working on laying out the exhibition catalog/book that goes along with the exhibition Signs of Change: Social Movement Cultures 1960s to Now which I curated with Dara Greenwald. The show has hung in NYC, Pittsburgh, Troy, NY and we hope the book will bring this giant collection of political movement posters, photographs, films, audio and ephemera to an even broader audience. Signs of Change the book should be out on AK Press in the Fall of 2009.
For more information on Justseeds be sure to check out their website: http://www.justseeds.org/
Staturday: Olympics in the South
On Friday, Rio de Janeiro became the first city in South America to ever be chosen to host an Olympic Games. In fact, it's only the third city in the Southern hemisphere to ever host the games. The other two: Melbourne, Australia in 1956 and Sydney, Australia in 2000.
This Week's Tasty 10
According to our handy site-metering utility, the top 10 most delicious items across the Serious Eats family of sites this week were ...
1. Taste Test: Cheap But Good Olive Oils »
2. Recreating the Adult Brownies from Andronico's »
3. The Best Mooncakes for the Mid-Autumn Festival »
4. Dinner Tonight: Skillet Macaroni and Cheese »
5. Seriously Asian: All About Dumplings »6. Talk: Five Guys. Not So Much »
7. In Season: Figs »
8. Cakespy: Brooklyn Basbousa »
9. Talk: Foodie-Related Halloween Costumes Ideas Anyone? »
10. Talk: They Carry ________ But Not _________?! »
October 2, 2009
The Burger Lab: Mastering the Art of Burger Blending with Eight Cuts of Beef
Shared by alaina
BURGER SCIENCE IN YOUR FACE!Note: You may already know J. Kenji Lopez-Alt (of Good Eater) 'round these parts from his previous burger exploits—making the Blumenburger and his 8-hour 12-burger binge. We're pleased to announce that he'll stop by every other week to give the comprehensive Kenji treatment to burger recipes this new column, The Burger Lab. In his inaugural post he analyzes eight kinds of beef cuts to find his ideal burger blend.
[Photographs: J. Kenji Lopez-Alt]
Blue Label Burger Recipe
Want to get straight to the burger-making? Here's the recipe for The Blue Label Burger Blend.
There's nothing new about blending different cuts of meat to make a better burger. But despite all I've read, and despite the fact that I've been fiddling with burger blends at least a few times a week for the past couple of years, I've yet to see a good, thorough, scientific analysis of what actually makes the best burger. Is it fat content? Texture? Flavor? Presumably all three, but what does one cut have to offer over another? Why mix three cuts instead of two? Would a fourth cut make it even better?
Due to the intense marketing efforts of liquor distributors, most whiskey drinkers in this country (myself included) tend to favor single malts as the pinnacle of expression of the form. But we're doing ourselves a disfavor. Surely blending whiskeys—that careful balancing act to achieve the perfect mix of high notes and low notes, of sweetness and smokiness—is a job equally impressive and intricate if not more delicious than distilling the spirit itself? And if the whiskey industry has Master blenders to manage their blends, surely the burger—a food with an equally noble heritage and devout following—requires just as much attention.
To this end, I decided to do a tasting of "single-malt burgers, carefully noting what distinguishes each cut from the rest, as well as cataloguing all the flavors that come under the umbrella term "beefy," in the hopes of coming up with the ultimate blend. The Blue Label Burger, if you will. I pulled out my boning knife and meat grinder, and headed to the butcher, determined to master the art of burger blending.
In choosing cuts of beef that could go into the burger, I first made a broad decision: This was to be an everyman's burger. Fancy-pants burgers exist, but they are contrary to the spirit of the sandwich. There would be no dry-aged cuts, no special breed cows, and nothing that is more suited for a steakhouse in my blend. Burgers, like good charcuterie, are about taking the cheap and ordinary, and converting it into the sublime. For this reason, I set an upper limit of $8 a pound for the cuts in my mix, which narrowed down my options to eight cuts: sirloin, chuck, short rib, skirt steak, hanger steak, flap meat, brisket, and a surprise entry—oxtail.
Sirloin ($5/pound)
Location: Top half of the cow, towards the back, just before the rump.
Alternatives: Butt steak, sirloin butt, sirloin steak, center-cut roast, culotte steak.
Fat Content: Low.
Flavor: It's often sold as the more expensive pre-ground option to chuck at the supermarket, though I'm baffled as to why. It is extremely tender, but lacks the fat necessary to keep it juicy. Its flavor offers a slight sour grassiness and nuttiness, but it's more of a blank canvas than a beef bomb.Chuck ($4 /pound)
Location: Top half of the cow, just behind the shoulders.
Alternatives: 7-rib roast, blade steak, flatiron steak, round bone roast
Fat Content: High.
Flavor: Chuck is like burger meat designed by committee: It's got a good lean to fat ratio, it's well-balanced in flavor, but it lacks real character. As a single meat, it makes the kind of burger that's tough to find fault with, but won't have you sucking the juices out of your napkin when you're done. If you've got only one choice to make at the butcher, this is the one to go with.Skirt Steak ($8/pound)
Location: Lower half of the cow, running from the plate to the flank. Cut from the cow's main daphragm muscle.
Alternatives: Fajitas meat, Philadelphia steak.
Fat Content: Low.
Flavor: This chef's cut can be a little difficult to track down in some areas. It has a strong, gamey flavor, and a distinct sourness. The texture in its whole form is rope-y, requiring you to cut it thinly against the grain. When ground, it acquires a slightly gritty texture that on its own, comes across as an almost dirty or dusty quality.Short Rib ($5 /pound)
Location: Short sections of rib with attached meat, cut from the front half of the cow, just below the loin.
Alternatives: Braising strips (boneless short ribs).
Fat Content: Very high.
Flavor: Extremely rich and nutty, with no grassiness or sourness at all. This cut is all umami, and is quite overwhelming on its own. The high degree fine marbling helps it stay moist even when the burgers are cooked beyond medium-rare.Flap Meat ($6/pound)
Location: From the back of the short loin—where porterhouse and T-bones come from—but closer to the belly of the animal.
Alternatives: Top sirloin tips, beef sirloin tips, sirloin tip steak, bavette d'aloyau.
Fat Content: Moderate.
Flavor: One of the most savory cuts around, with a substantial, chewy texture. Like short ribs, it lacks offsetting grassy notes, but unlike short ribs, it also lacks fat. Ground on its own, it has a grainy texture that crumbles more easily than some finer-grained cuts.Hanger Steak ($7/pound)
Location: "Hangs" between the last rib on the cow and the loin
Alternatives: bavette, hanging tenderloin, butcher's steak, often misspelled "hangar" steak, but it's beef, not a bloody airplane.
Fat Content: Moderate.
Flavor: This butcher's cut is loved by chef's for its gaminess and inexpensiveness. It has a distinct, almost cheesy, rancid overtone (in a good way). Its biggest drawback is its gritty, crumbly texture when ground, and the lack of high notes in its flavor profile.Brisket ($7/pound)
Location: From the belly region of the front half of the cow.
Fat Content: Depending on butchering, moderate to low.
Flavor: Extremely grassy and sour, with a distinct aroma of iron and liver. A little grainy when ground, and completely lacking in rich, savory notes. It's no wonder this cut is often pickled for use a corned beef or pastrami—it tastes almost pickled on its own.Ox-Tail ($4/pound)
Location: Do I really need to clarify?
Fat Content: Ridiculously high.
Flavor: Immensely savory, with richness, nuttiness, and gaminess to spare. Thanks to the diligent work of flies, this muscle is used constantly throughout the cow's life, and as a result, is about as flavorful as they come. It's as if the cow swallowed an entire other cow,* compressed it, and shoved it all into its own tail. Fattiness that doesn't just blur the line between delicious and over-indulgent, but gives them both a miss, jumping straight into the realm of obscene. It leaves a coat in your mouth reminiscent of drinking a beef-flavored candle.*Legally not possible since the mad cow scare.
Creating the Blend
Through this tasting, I discovered that beef has four basic flavors:
- Nutty: Comes across as a cheesy, almost parmesan-esque flavor.
- Grassy/sour: Where beef gets its high notes. Can come across as a slight metallic, iron flavor.
- Rich/umami: Different from fattiness, and gives you a full, meaty sensation in your mouth and on the back of your tongue.
- Gamey/livery: In the wrong context can come across as almost rancid, but in moderation can add depth to an otherwise boring blend.
In order for a burger to invoke that sensation that we describe as "beefy," all four of these flavor components need to be in balance. My first line of thought was to try and pick just two cuts of meat that offer a good cross-section of these flavors, and provides ample, but not overwhelming fat. To this end, I tried various blends consisting of short ribs or oxtail (for rich, nutty flavors), combined variously with skirt steak, hanger, and brisket (for high notes and gaminess). Immediately, oxtail was right out—it was simply too much for my mouth to handle. Though the flavor of the short rib blends were alright, they brought me to my second important discovery—texture.
Finding the Right Texture
In all three mixes, the gritty, crumbly texture of the cuts I was mixing in with the short rib was ruining the overall burger. I thought that perhaps grinding it twice, or grinding it with a smaller die would solve the problem, but no good—these rough-grained cuts have a hard time holding together once ground. The only way I could get the burgers to form properly was to massage them and press them into submission, at which point grittiness was replaced by toughness, an equally undesirable state of affairs.
That's when I realized—perhaps sirloin does have a use after all? Though it's not too flavorful on its own, it's very tender, and binds extremely well. I ground up a new batch of meat, this time mixing in one part short rib and brisket (the best tasting of the previous blends), to two parts sirloin. Much better—the burgers held together perfectly, and had a nice mix of textures: the tenderness of the sirloin, combined with the slight, steak-like chew of the short rib. And with the brisket only making up a quarter of the mix, its crumbly texture was completely eradicated. Unfortunately, gone too was a lot of the flavors. Since sirloin is so bland, the flavor of the short rib and brisket that came through was still perfectly balanced—there just wasn't enough of it.
I found that I could increase the ratio of short rib and brisket to sirloin up until they were all in nearly equal parts (any more than that, and cohesion issues resumed), giving me the best burger blend yet, but I knew there was something better out there. Then I realized—the oxtail that I had so quickly dismissed out of hand might actually be useful. With its intense savory/nutty/gamey flavor, as well as its great fat content, could I use it in place of the short ribs to boost up my beef? It worked perfectly. Now that it was only a bit player in a larger mix, its intensity was largely played down, perfectly tempered by the bland tenderness of the sirloin, and the high notes from the brisket.
In retrospect, it all seems so obvious: oxtail in a burger? Of course! But like all good things in life, this burger blend is still a work in progress, and every time I play with it, I discover something new. Anybody else out there have any good burger-grinding tips? I've tinkered with adding suet and bone marrow for added fat, but have yet to seriously document the efforts in an organized way.
Continue here for The Blue Label Burger Blend »
slapped down in copenhagen
Last night we were talking about the Olympic bid, and thinking through the calculus of Obama making the trip to Copenhagen for the final presentation... I was obviously naive in thinking that this had to be a bit like Bill Clinton heading to North Korea -- for someone of his stature to get on a plane, the deal had to already be in the bag.
Obviously not. As Peter Baker puts it so succinctly in his New York Times piece...
Rarely has a president put his credibility on the line on the world stage in such a personal way and been slapped down so sharply in real time.Ouch.
typepad motion
If you follow along with the web 2.0 news, you've probably already seen the headlines that we introduced a couple of big things this week: the TypePad Platform and TypePad Motion. Huge congrats are in order for the entire team...which was actually two teams working closely together: the back-end team working on exposing key pieces of TypePad as a set of REST-based APIs, and the front-end team building a beautiful Django application for running simple, social connected communities that are powered by those TypePad APIs.
You can read more about TypePad Motion, join the developer program and download the Django bits from Github. But for the high level overview the blogs are where it's at: Leah Culver has a great post about what the team built, while Chris Alden's post puts all of this new stuff in broader Six Apart context.
I love working with this team, and bringing TypePad Motion to market -- with real sites running real software powering real communities -- has been a ton of fun. There's a lot more to do, of course, but that's always the way it is when you launch a product. Onwards!
warm and fuzzy
I’m wondering why the word ‘marketing’ has been substituted by the relatively meaningless ‘user growth’ in the title of Automattic’s marketing guy. Surely we are past the days when we had to worry about the open source fanboys fretting about commercialisation? Anyone who was bothered by that has long gone by now. My own [...]
Why Perl 5.11.0 Matters
Jesse Vincent announced the Perl 5.11.0 release.
Perl 5.11.0 is the first release in the development track of Perl 5. Perl 5.11.x will become Perl 5.12.0 at some point in the future. 5.11.0 represents years of development -- patches, branches, backports, changes, bugfixes, cleanups, rephrasings, and lots of work behind the scenes to improve the Perl 5 language.
The most important part of the release announcement is the schedule for subsequent releases in the Perl 5.11.x family: a new development release every month on the 20th. Jesse's announcement explains that the intent of the new development model is to avoid burning out the brilliant, dedicated, and valuable people who've been pumpkings before. That's important.
There are other valuable results of this change, though. The most important is that Perl 5.11.x reduces risks associated with developing and releasing Perl 5.12.0:
- The release process itself has changed (and will continue to change) to make monthly releases possible. The release process won't scale if it takes a week's worth of effort on the part of any individual. Yet monthly development releases are much less risky than supported releases; a bit of confusion or a delay is less dramatic.
- The development process will (likely) fall into a cadence around the monthly releases. Even though development releases can have less polish than a supported release, no one wants to release an uninstallable tarball which fails important tests. This provides a pressure to keep the trunk stable and to merge destabilizing changes just after a release.
- Multiple potential release managers remove the bottleneck on one individual, require a well-understood, documented, and automated release process, and allow anyone trustworthy to step in at the last moment.
- Writing release notes which represent a month's worth of work is easier than writing release notes (and changelogs and...) that represent a year's worth of work. The release notes and deltas for Perl 5.12 should be a concatenation of the release notes and deltas for all releases in the Perl 5.11.x family.
- Regular releases improve the testability of software by providing a convenient point for mutual debugging. Bisecting a month's worth of changes to find a bug is easier than bisecting a year's worth of changes to find a bug.
- Experimental features can reach a wider audience of testers and developers without p5p committing to supporting those features as-is (or at all) in stable releases. Faster feedback is always useful.
I suspect -- but cannot prove yet -- that regular releases will improve the velocity of Perl 5 development as well as improving the long-term planning of Perl 5. That'll be easier to measure by early 2010.
Congratulations to Jesse and all of the other Perl 5 committers.
New Apple Wireless Keyboard and Mouse show up in FCC database
Filed under: Peripherals, Rumors
We've been hearing a lot about a new mouse from Apple lately, and earlier today images and additional documentation about a new Apple Wireless Keyboard and Mouse (using Bluetooth) showed up in the FCC database. The new keyboard has a model number of A1314, while the mouse has a model number of A1296. The dimensions of the new wireless keyboard are smaller than the current Apple Wireless Keyboard, particularly in the distance between the top and bottom of the keyboard. There are still few details on the new mouse at this point.
The FCC images were quickly pulled from the FCC database, then re-added later in the day with details cropped out, but they can still be found in all of their original glory over on our sister site Engadget.
[via Engadget]TUAWNew Apple Wireless Keyboard and Mouse show up in FCC database originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Fri, 02 Oct 2009 16:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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The original IBM ThinkPad
A promotional notepad given away by IBM was the inspiration for the computer giant's popular ThinkPad.
Update: An inspired directly by the brown leather cover of the notepad, the ThinkPad Reserve collection. (thx, saket)
Tags: IBM
Twitter Lists Organizes People You Follow
In addition to geolocation, Twitter’s about to launch their new lists feature, which lets you organize the people you follow into lists and see what lists others have included you on.
For example, I can create a list called “Lifehacker editors” or “Co-workers” or “NYC pals” or “Sci-Fi experts”, and view tweets just from those people in a list view. I’ve been making lists of people I follow using TweetDeck for some time now. However, having this baked into the Twitter web site and API makes it more convenient and easy to share. Here are some screenshots of how it works from the beta.
Click on “Create a new list” to name your list and set it to public (anyone can see) or private (only you can see it). Here I’m making a Twitter list of folks I follow from the popular web series, The Guild.
Then, add people you follow to your lists from your Following page, or from his/her individual Twitter page.
After I added a bunch of Guildies to my list, I can see just tweets from them.
The lists feature also includes a little ego-surfing information, too. I can see how many lists I’ve been included on, and I can also see what public lists any other user’s on. Here’s @wilw’s right now–surely his list of lists will blow up once lists get released.
In essence, lists puts Twitter’s controversial “suggested users” into the hands of the users. As I said on Twitter, lists is a much-needed upgrade to “Follow Friday” recommendations, and a handy organizing tool for anyone who follows more than a few people on Twitter. (Thanks to the Twitter folks for giving me a sneak peek at the Lists beta.)
The Simpsons' Mr. Burns Takes on Bloomberg
Somebody doesn't like the fact that Mike Bloomberg had the rules changed so he could run for a third term as Mayor of New York City. These posters -- designed à la Shepard Fairey's Obama poster -- have been popping up around town. Snapped this one on 14th Street near Union Square.
Introducing Eater National, New Design, & Eater Jobs!
Oh, did you notice things look a little different around here? Eater's aesthetic overhaul—the first since the site launched nearly five years ago—isn't the only change. Nor is the launch of the Eater Jobs Marketplace, about which we'll have more to say shortly. Rather, today's big announcement is the launch of Eater National, our brand-new site that expands our NY/LA/SF purview to cover all the vital restaurant, celebrity chef, and, yes, reality TV news that's fit to eat across this great country. Its editor is Paolo Lucchesi, our longtime Eater SF editor, and it's off and running with an announcement of vital import to all food bloggers. Please check out the site and let us know what you think.
The advent of Eater National will result in some changes to the programming around here. Most non-city-specific items will now run on Eater National, freeing us here to focus even more closely on the local restaurant and nightlife scene. Also a part of the introduction of Eater National, the Eater Network will be expanding to a new tier of cities, which will include Chicago, Las Vegas, Portland, Miami and others—with more news to come on these in the coming days and weeks.
Meantime, while you play around with our new design, do let us know if you find any bugs. Or if you just want to vent. Or say hi. Emails to the tipline, svp. And, as always, our profound thanks for your support of Eater.
· Eater National [eater.com]
· And Now, A Whole New Eater Universe [Eater National]
Boom Boom Room May Drop Killer Name, Relaunch as QT
Steve Lewis brings the soul crushing news today that the hottest and best named space in town, the Standard Hotel's The Boom Boom Room, will soon be getting a new name: "...they were sort of trying out the name but decided we need a new one...we didn't realize how many other Boom Boom Rooms were out there, one of the names André Balazs is considering is QT, as in on the QT." (As in, on the quiet.) It was also the name of Balazs' midtown hotel of yore. The folks over at Grub Street are pretty sure that the name change is the result of a cease and desist letter from a San Francisco music venue of the same name. Because why else would Andre cede that moniker?
And to be frank, the QT name just does not play. Who wants to go to a bar called QT as opposed to the Boom Boom Room? Readers, it's time to take some action. Come up with the best replacement names, put them in the comments, and maybe Andre will change his mind.
· The Boom Boom Room is Doomed [BB]
· Is the Boom Boom Room Now QT Owing to a Cease and Desist? [GS]
Hardly Working: Woody Allen BUT FOCUS ON THE ART, PEOPLE, THE...
Hardly Working: Woody Allen
BUT FOCUS ON THE ART, PEOPLE, THE ART
blakeley: This is one of the most amazing Hardly Working videos I’ve ever seen… and I’ve seen a lot of them.
This is fantastic.
via: fatmanatee
Tango
On September 30th, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) added 76 new items to its "List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity", for safeguarding and preservation. The "Intangible" list is a companion to UNESCO's World Heritage list, which focuses on physical sites worldwide. Submitted jointly by member states Argentina and Uruguay, the "symbolic universe" of tango was among the traditions added to the list. Tango is a deep-rooted tradition of dance, poetry and song, tied closely to the Rio de la Plata region of the two countries, and remains popular in competition, for pleasure, and for health - doctors worldwide are experimenting with tango as dance therapy to treat problems ranging from Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease to phobias and marital breakdowns. (29 photos total)
Melting Men
Melting Men. To highlight global warming, artist Nele Azevedo installed 1,000 ice sculptures of sitting men on the steps of Berlin’s concert hall. Since 2005, she has assembled the work in six cities around the world. Though each installation lives for only 30 minutes, images on the internet have circulated widely. The Berlin installation was sponsored by the WWF and coincided with the release of their report on Arctic warming.
Local Proposal Results In Acceptance
In case you were curious about commenter ContainsHotLiquid, who revealed the other evening that he was going to propose to his lady-friend with a silver deco ring with a sapphire on Wednesday: she said yes! And she loved the ring!
A couple of Friday shirtdresses, a couple of Friday sales ...
Janet at Lanetz Living is off to the lake this weekend, but her site is having a 15% off sale while she's gone -- through Monday at midnight (CST)! (Use the coupon discount code LAKE in the box on the shipping page.)
And Rita at Cemetarian is having a sale, too, which mean you can get this doozy for 15% off (you can get 15% off anything from now until Oct. 15, with free shipping in the US, too -- [edited to add] use the code LUV):
I don't know how you could possibly choose between these two. I recommend grabbing 'em both. On your mark, get set, GO!
Know Your Meme: Geddan Get Down
The Rocketboom Institute for Internet Studies gets down. Geddan quartet, Nico Nico Douga, Volume chaos GoldenEye 007, Goldeneye 007 - Gets down, strange mario 64 shindou edition glitch otherwise known as cartridge tilting, Super Mario Clouds, Carnival Chaos Geddan GoldenEye, Carnival Chaos Geddan GoldenEye, Geddan, GET DOWN on top of Toilet?!, Nitori gets down, Kannagi Geddan, Death Note Get Down, Basic Geddan, Kimoto Geddan, crazy japanese poster, Anime Geddan, YouTube Search for Geddan, Kiko gets down in supermarket, TAILS Gets Down, Super Mario Gets Down, Mario gets down before Luigi, Sonic the Hedgehog Gets Down, WEEGEE Gets Down, Ronald McDonald, Joker Gets Down!, Kim Jung Il version, Mefuki Get Down, Get Down with Sushi!, KAITO, LLAMAS!, Compilation time!?!, Backstreetboys “GET DOWN”
Serious Grape: Decanting Demystified
On Fridays, Deb Harkness of Good Wine Under $20 drops by with Serious Grape.
[Photograph: Deb Harkness]
The idea of decanting a wine—pouring the contents of a bottle into another vessel—may strike you as fussy and pretentious act, conjuring up images of white-gloved butlers and wine snobs. People have been decanting wine since at least Roman times because until recently, wine was not filtered and clarified as part of the wine-making process.
Even with modern wine-making, there are two excellent reasons to decant wine: it removes the sediment in older wine and it aerates younger wines, which can make a difference in how they taste.
In the case of older wine, sediments can form as part of the aging process. These sediments cloud the wine and if you get a chunk in your mouth, they can be unpleasantly bitter and drying.
Decanting an older bottle of wine slowly into another vessel enables you to keep the sediments (and a little bit of the wine) in the bottle. It takes some practice so I always use a fine mesh filter to catch the solids. With old wines experts recommend decanting immediately before serving—too much exposure to air can deaden flavors and aromas.
In the case of younger wine—particularly tannic reds like Cabernet Sauvignon and Italian Barolos—some people feel that decanting increases the aeration of a wine and leads to a smoother, more developed taste in the mouth. This has been scientifically challenged, but as in all matters of taste the important thing to follow is your own taste buds and decide what you prefer.
For me, I find that big, bold red that cause mouth puckering and seem raspy at first do smooth out after they've "breathed" in a decanter for 10 to 20 minutes. You get the same effect by vigorously swirling your wine glass before taking a sip.
When I tasted the 2007 Clos LaChance Meritage "Crimson Topaz" ($18; find this wine) I could tell from the oak and strong tannins that it might improve after being poured into a decanter. Sure enough, the aromas of smoke and cherry that I initially detected picked up some more minty, herbal notes. And in the flavor department, the wine went from oak and cherry to smooth layers of strawberry, cherry, raspberry, and herbs.
If you're reluctant to decant because it reminds you of that dusty, broad-bottomed decanter that sat on your parents' sideboard year in and year out, know that there are stylish options in the market. This Spiegelau Siena decanter (suggested retail $99, but you can find deals online for $70 to 85) looks more like a piece of sculpture than a decanter. I wouldn't mind having it on my dining room table whether or not it was in use. And unlike many older decanters, new decanters (such as this one) are often dishwasher-safe.
Of course any vessel will do. Using glass—such as an old mayonnaise jar, your Sangria pitcher, a water jug—is often preferable with older wines if you are trying to avoid sediment. Give decanting a try with your next bottle of red and see what you think. Does decanting make a difference to your tastebuds?
Full disclosure: Spiegelau loaned me a decanter for this experiment, and I received the Clos LaChance Meritage as a sample.
Chicago 2017
The 2016 announcement is just hours away. Will it be Chicago? Rio? Madrid? Tokyo? The favorites appear to be Chicago or Rio, but who knows. I’d like to see Chicago win.
As as Chicagoan, I’ve seen the campaign close up. A recent poll suggests Chicago citizens are about equally split on whether or not they want the games. The results show slippage from the 2-to-1 support found in an earlier Tribune poll in February.
I think this reveals a flaw in the local marketing of the games. And I think there’s a good lesson in all this: Chicago sold the features, not the benefits. Chicago didn’t tell its citizens why the games would be good for Chicago. Chicago didn’t lay out the lasting legacy of the games for the city. What’s really in it for us? Why should we really support it? What happens after they are over? 8 years of work for a few weeks of sunshine. Then what?
This is a bit of Friday-morning quarterbacking, but here’s what I would have loved to have seen: A campaign centered around Chicago 2017. Show us what the city will look like after the Olympics. Give us a reason to want the games for the decade after the games. Give us examples… If a kid’s 16 years old today, what will the city be like for her when she’s 26? How will the games make Chicago a better place for Chicagoans. Will it be a better place to grow up? Why? Will it be a better place to work? Why? Why would we want to put up with all the construction, traffic, congestion, and attention? Why will it all be worth it?
I do hope we get the games. I do think it will be great for the city. But I have a hard time communicating why. And if I can’t say why, I can’t tell other people why. Shallow support is barely support. That’s a problem.
The bad reasons — the reasons not to support the bid — are the easy reasons: Debt, higher taxes, corruption. A Chicago 2017 campaign could have given me the good reasons. They could have made the good reasons easier to remember and communicate than the bad reasons. I think Chicago 2017 would have put more people into the “I’m for the games” camp than just under 50% and falling.
Finalists in the LRB’s Great Ongoing Personals Ads Competition
From time to time, we like to check in on the advanced mating competition that is the London Review of Books classified ads Personals section. Recently, the elaborate attempts to meet and dally have reached dizzying, mysterious new heights. We have three recent favorites! Now let us present the awards for best man-seeking-woman, best woman-seeking-man, and best homo.
Best ad by a straight woman:
You are the best person ever.
Best ad by a straight man:
Please do!
Best gay ad:
What can I say? I want to do them all.
Beep baseball
Beep baseball is the classic American pastime adapted for the blind and visually impaired. In order to appreciate the athleticism of the game, and the fun that most sighted folks are missing, here's a video of beep baseball in action.
The ball used contains a beeping device that is loud enough to aid in sightless location. The six players on the field are helped by a sighted pitcher, who announces "pitch" or "ball" as they toss to a sighted catcher. Batters are allowed four strikes and one pass, but the fourth swing must be a clear, defined miss. The game has six innings, the standard three outs per inning, and two bases, not three. Baseball's traditional tile-like bases are replaced with padded cylinders that stand four feet tall and give off a distinct buzz once activated. The batter doesn't know which base will be activated, but must run to whichever sounds, tackling the base before defense has a chance to field the ball. If the runner makes it in time, a run is scored. Two sighted "spotters" also play the field and call out which direction the ball has headed using a system based on numbers assigned to each outfielder. Spotters can only announce one number, and the outfielders must communicate with each other to locate the ball. Cheering is discouraged because it interferes with play.
Tags: sports
AccuWeather.com Photo Gallery: 1st snow of the season for newborn kitten Image
This is a Moderator's Pick!1st snow of the season for newborn kitten
Description: In a way the 1st snow of the season may only be a dusting but it may be a sign of things to come. For the wildlife animals newborns, the 1st snow is a big change.
Sarah Palin’s Book Cover Revealed
Here it is, the cover to The Most Important Book Of Our Time. The flag pin is a nice touch. And the red pullover is a nice symbolic nod to her following in the red states. But what is she looking at?
Opinion: The Bobby Valentine Mets
Bring me Bobby Valentine… I want him to manage the Mets.
His knowledge of the game, his connection to Mets fans, and the team’s history, and his brand of baseball, is exactly what this franchise needs, for a variety of reasons.
In July, 97 percent of people who voted on MetsBlog.com said they currently have a positive view of Valentine… who, by the way, lost to the Yankees in a World Series… yet, 97 percent of people still like him.
Valentine is a brilliant on-field strategist, which the Mets will need if they are serious about building a team around pitching, top-notch defense, and a hit-and-run, score-from-first-on-a-double type of offense.
He treats all of his players equally, he is notorious for working hard for 27 outs, and he demands that his players do the same. As such, I believe he would bring a more disciplined, more creative, energetic and entertaining brand of baseball to Citi Field, one in which Mets fans have seen from him before and value as much as any other era in team history… despite never winning a Championship.
He explained to reporters on Tuesday that his new contract with ESPN allows him to leave the network at any time to take a job managing in the major leagues… and, according to the New York Post, “Valentine sidestepped a direct question on whether he would be open to returning to the Mets if Manuel is fired.”
The problem is, though Ownership and Omar Minaya like him very much, I think Valentine may be too much for this administration. I sense the team feels his personality and his presence, and his vision, and the stamp with which he’d put on the organization, are more than they are ready to take on right now… which is a shame. From what I can gather, the Mets see Valentine as more of a short-term solution, a Billy Martin-type band-aide, who can come in to change the climate, but who is not someone a franchise can build a sustainable program around.
However, to me, Valentine is exactly the type of person you mold your team around, especially the Mets, as he embodies everything Mets fans are about. Yes, he is quirky, but he is also an underdog with local roots, he played for the Mets, he grew up rooting for them, he played hard, he manages hard, he is organized and different and constantly working to be the smartest person on the field, and, most important, he wants to win, but he also understands that baseball is a game and should be fun – these are all qualities I want the Mets to be.
In fact, I’d like to see Valentine’s approach to baseball being supported by people in the minor-league system, as well, like through his friend, Wally Backman, who would be the ideal candidate to manage their Double-A team.
In other words, “If you are going to play for Valentine and the Mets, you will play smart, old school, exciting National League baseball,” or else go to another team.
Frankly, I believe, if the Mets make no other change this off season, fans would be excited for Opening Day simply knowing Valentine was in the dugout. Instead, however, I see the Mets leaning towards giving Minaya and Manuel one more year together, ‘to finish what they started,’ so to speak, and, if the team falls short again next year, maybe they’ll look to re-shape the franchise the following off season.
The thing is, with so many holes on the roster, in the farm system, and in the stands, why wait for tomorrow when you can get started today.
Bring back Bobby Valentine, before he goes to another team.
Dessert Truck to Open Brick-and-Mortar Spot on Clinton St.
According to the fall previews, Michael 'Empire Builder' Huynh was planning on opening a new restaurant at 6 Clinton Street called B Clinton. Not anymore. An email from Jerome Chang of the now defunct—but fondly remembered—Dessert Truck reveals that he and his partners are taking over the space, finally finding a brick and mortar home two months after the city unceremoniously closed down their popular mobile dessert operation:
We would like to announce our upcoming move to 6 Clinton Street (LES) where we'll be opening up shop sometime within the next few months. We cannot give an opening date because the lease has just been signed.It will be interesting if they focus solely on dessert, given sweets spot Luxee just closed in the same spot back in August. And our condolences to Michael Huynh. Let's hope he can open his daily changing market menu concept somewhere else.And no, the project will not be called "DessertTruck Stop." The name is TBD. This next DessertTruck project will remain true to our ideals of quality, affordability and accessibility. We will feature our DessertTruck menu along with plenty of new items. We'd also like to thank everyone for their enthusiastic support.
· Truck Report SHOCKER: City Shutters Dessert Truck [~E~]
Amazing avalanche rescue video
A skier with a video camera on his helmet gets caught in an avalanche and then, four and a half minutes later, gets rescued. The good stuff starts around one minute in.
This was a decent sized avalanche. 1,500 feet the dude fell in a little over 20 seconds. The crown was about 1 - 1.5m. The chute that he got sucked through to the skier's right was flanked on either side by cliff bands that were about 30m tall. He luckily didn't break any bones and obviously didn't hit anything on the run out.
I had always assumed -- and this is likely based almost entirely on an episode of The Simpsons -- that you had options when buried by an avalanche...like digging yourself out or at least being able to move. Not so says the Utah Avalanche Center FAQ:
It doesn't matter which way is up. You can't dig yourself out of avalanche debris. It's like you are buried in concrete. Your friends must dig you out.
The FAQ contains a story by the director of the UAC about surviving an avalanche of his own; he confirms the concrete-like hardness of post-avalanche snow.
Tags: skiing sports videoBut after a long while, after I was about to pass out from lack of air, the avalanche began to slow down and the tumbling finally stopped. I was on the surface and I could breathe again. But as I bobbed along on the soft, moving blanket of snow, which had slowed from about 50 miles per hour to around 30, I discovered that my body was quite a bit denser than avalanche debris and it tended to sink if it wasn't swimming hard. [...] Eventually, the swimming worked, and when the avalanche finally came to a stop I found myself buried only to my waist, breathing hard, very wet and very cold.
I remembered from the avalanche books that debris instantly sets up like concrete as soon as it comes to a stop but its one of those facts that you don't entirely believe. But sure enough, everything below the snow surface was like a body cast. Barehanded, (the first thing an avalanche does is rip off your hat and mittens) I chipped away at the rock-hard snow with my shovel for a good 5 minutes before I could finally work my legs free.
Mets Medical Staff - An Homage
The Mets medical staff in action, courtesy of the Bayside Boys from Loge13:
Making Pączki, or Polish Doughnuts
There are all sorts of doughnuts in this world, but few seem to be as perfect filling delivery vehicles as these pączki, or Polish doughnuts.
"Based on a yeast starter," according to this recipe from Bon Vivant, "the batter is then enriched with eggs, fat and flavorings before being filled with a teaspoon or two of your preferred confiture or cream and deep-fried to a golden hue."
Related
Celebrate Fat Thursday With Paczki, the Polish Jelly Doughnuts
Spiced Buttermilk Doughnut Recipe
Grilled Doughnuts, Better Than Regular Doughnuts
October 1, 2009
Where the Wild Things Are
Be Still! ...
Q&A with short film curator Jonathan Wells
Jonathan Wells of Flux is helping to curate TED's first-ever short film contest, with winners to be shown at TEDIndia in November. He's been involved in choosing shorts for TED's onstage program for a couple of years. We asked him about curating short films -- and how he ended up with this job:
What qualities do you look for in a TED short film?
The best TED film is smart and beautiful and evokes a sense of wonder. We strive to find films that have all three of these qualities. The best films, like the best TEDTalks, are great ideas that are well delivered.
How did you end up being the short film guy for TED?For 10 years I ran RESFEST, a festival I founded that toured the world. The festival was lauded for showcasing innovative short films and music videos that otherwise may not be seen.
These types of inventive films, regardless of budget or style or genre, were a perfect match for TED's short film programming.
Tell me a little bit about Flux.
Flux is a creative studio and global creative community. As a company, we curate film/art/music/design experiences of all kinds around the world. Through our projects, events and online journal we foster a creative community that encourages collaboration.
Define a TED short film in 6 words.A small morsel of visual inspiration -- OR -- A little bit of movie magic.
If you've got a short film that we should see, and it's 30 secs to 3 mins long, enter our short film contest. Deadline is Oct. 12, 2009. Find details and the brief entry form >>
Every day this week on the TED Blog, we're featuring a short film that played live at TED. Today's is a PSA called "Amazing Jumbo Elephant Landing," produced by the International Fund for Animal Welfare. "Amazing Jumbo Elephant Landing" screened at TED2009 in Long Beach and Palm Springs.
Enter TED's short film contest >>
The Truth About Jobs That No One Wants To Tell You
Unemployment will almost certainly in double-digits next year -- and may remain there for some time. And for every person who shows up as unemployed in the Bureau of Labor Statistics' household survey, you can bet there's another either too discouraged to look for work or working part time who'd rather have a full-time job or else taking home less pay than before (I'm in the last category, now that the University of California has instituted pay cuts). And there's yet another person who's more fearful that he or she will be next to lose a job.
In other words, ten percent unemployment really means twenty percent underemployment or anxious employment. All of which translates directly into late payments on mortgages, credit cards, auto and student loans, and loss of health insurance. It also means sleeplessness for tens of millions of Americans. And, of course, fewer purchases (more on this in a moment).
Unemployment of this magnitude and duration also translates into ugly politics, because fear and anxiety are fertile grounds for demagogues weilding the politics of resentment against immigrants, blacks, the poor, government leaders, business leaders, Jews, and other easy targets. It's already started. Next year is a mid-term election. Be prepared for worse.
So why is unemployment and underemployment so high, and why is it likely to remain high for some time? Because, as noted, people who are worried about their jobs or have no jobs, and who are also trying to get out from under a pile of debt, are not going do a lot of shopping. And businesses that don’t have customers aren’t going do a lot of new investing. And foreign nations also suffering high unemployment aren’t going to buy a lot of our goods and services.
And without customers, companies won't hire. They'll cut payrolls instead.
Which brings us to the obvious question: Who’s going to buy the stuff we make or the services we provide, and therefore bring jobs back? There’s only one buyer left: The government.
Let me say this as clearly and forcefully as I can: The federal government should be spending even more than it already is on roads and bridges and schools and parks and everything else we need. It should make up for cutbacks at the state level, and then some. This is the only way to put Americans back to work. We did it during the Depression. It was called the WPA.
Yes, I know. Our government is already deep in debt. But let me tell you something: When one out of six Americans is unemployed or underemployed, this is no time to worry about the debt.
When I was a small boy my father told me that I and my kids and my grand-kids would be paying down the debt created by Franklin D. Roosevelt during the Depression and World War II. I didn’t even know what a debt was, but it kept me up at night.
My father was right about a lot of things, but he was wrong about this. America paid down FDR’s debt in the 1950s, when Americans went back to work, when the economy was growing again, and when our incomes grew, too. We paid taxes, and in a few years that FDR debt had shrunk to almost nothing.
You see? The most important thing right now is getting the jobs back, and getting the economy growing again.
People who now obsess about government debt have it backwards. The problem isn’t the debt. The problem is just the opposite. It’s that at a time like this, when consumers and businesses and exports can’t do it, government has to spend more to get Americans back to work and recharge the economy. Then – after people are working and the economy is growing – we can pay down that debt.
But if government doesn’t spend more right now and get Americans back to work, we could be out of work for years. And the debt will be with us even longer. And politics could get much uglier.
And It Feels So Good, A-M
Kelefa Sanneh and I spoke with Ben Greenman about band reunions over at the Goings On blog. Go read that, and then come back.
I also polled you about reunions. I asked which bands you wanted to see reform like Voltron (or the new, sightly smaller touring version of Voltron). The results are after the jump, with some light editorializing on my part to make it less of a data plod. For bands that received more than one mention, the total number of mentions is in parentheses.
- ’N Sync
A global tour could do heavy business. Upside for Justin: Not much. Everyone else: priceless. I would spend folding money to see them do “Bye Bye Bye.”
- A Tribe Called Quest (4)
The most requested hip-hop group in this minor poll. Phife has struggled with diabetes, and undergone kidney replacement surgery. If he stays healthy, a reunion might be plausible. I saw them at Rock The Bells a few years ago and was surprised by how energetic they were. Q-Tip is still a reliable live choice on his own, and his own albums are being released so sporadically that he keeps qualifying for his very own reunion.
- ABBA
Only one vote? Come on! Never mind that they were barely a live band. This is The Ramones of pop music—they cannot, as a concept, get old.
- Angel’in Heavy Syrup
That one’s on you.
- Arab On Radar
- Band of Susans
I know one of the Susans personally. (Our sons clash on the soccer field.) I loved “Hope Against Hope.” If you like drones and very loud guitars, you should hope for this one.
- The Beta Band
Never got this band. (Sorry, beardos!) I would be happy to have a late epiphany, though. Age doesn’t seem to be a factor yet, so it could work.
- Bikini Kill
Kathleen Hanna married Ad Rock in 2006, and Le Tigre is either defunct or sleeping. (Is that another reunion? Could Le Tigre open for Bikini Kill?) Somebody told me Hanna was an interior decorator, but I cannot confirm this.
- The Birthday Party
Bassist Tracy Pew died in 1986, so this can’t happen. It would be close to the top of my list otherwise. The band was unique and weirdly potent, the template for The Jesus Lizard and dozens of other aggressive bands. Watch this live performance of “Junkyard,” taped for a German television show in the early eighties. You will hear the guillotine bass sound that changed Chicago and see Nick Cave being skinny and loopy, which may confuse those who recently wished him a happy fifty-second birthday. Cave started out as a gifted front-loon in tradition of Iggy, always looking for new ways to lose control without falling out of the picture. Also: Tracy Pew’s cowboy hat is more hardcore than you, your grandmother, and a taxicab on fire.
- Black Flag (3)
Various lineups received votes. Perhaps Dez Cadena and Henry Rollins could arm-wrestle to see who sings first.
- Black Star
Mos Def is apparently involved in a documentary about the black punk-rock band Death. Not death, but Death. And black like people, not like a sub-genre.
- Brand Nubian (1990 lineup)
I once tried to interview Brand Nubian’s Lord Jamar. The group’s publicist, obviously uncomfortable, said, “Jamar’s not really into white people right now. Nothing personal.” If any rap group is the cosmic yang to Glenn Beck’s yin, it’s this one.
- Coctails
- Cocteau Twins
I am surprised more people didn’t go for this one. I could see three sold out nights at Hammerstein, easily.
- Cop Shoot Cop
- Cream
- Cro-Mags
- Dave Holland/Steve Coleman/Jack DeJohnette (from “Triplicate,” 1988)
I do like a reader with a love of specifics. I would see DeJohnette play with a sock, so I vote for this one as a matter of principle.
- Dead Kennedys (2)
- Dead Milkmen
Let the dead be.
- Death From Above 1979
This speaks to K’s first answer: this band broke up in 2006.
- Destiny’s Child
They were fantastic when I saw them in 2001. The show was in Peoria. I left my rental car headlights on, and had to wait for AAA to pick me up in the parking lot. I got to know the Midwestern flatness very well over the course of three hours. It was worth it, though, because I got to interview the band and Beyoncé told me my older son looked like Justin Timberlake. He can use that if a mean girl tries to burn him one day. “OH YEAH? YOU KNOW WHAT BEYONCÉ SAID? QUIET NOW, HUH?”
- Devo
I saw their reunion performance at Central Park Summerstage a few years ago and had a fine time. I don’t think the passage of time makes it easier to play in a super-duper, uptight fashion, though. (See the previous post on The Feelies’ recent performance of “Crazy Rhythms.”)
- Disco Inferno
I never did my homework on this band. Sorry, England!
- DNA
A fantastic idea, and everybody seems to be in good health. DNA also were not a tempo or a tightness band, so it could work.
- The Dream Syndicate
- Elastica
Yes! Please!
- Felt
- Fugazi
The six or seven Fugazi shows I saw are at the top of my all-time list, behind only Bad Brains and a few Sonic Youth shows.
- Galaxie 500
They were dreamy at the one show I saw, which took place at the old Knitting Factory on Houston Street.
- Gang Starr
Live? I love them, but I don’t know.
- Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five
Cowboy died, so this isn’t possible. I saw the oft-discussed Clash show at Bond’s where they were booed off the stage. Too little happened for me to know if they were any good at performing. They had some grand leather outfits.
- The Grifters
Great idea. I saw them at Under Acme and loved how smeared their sound was. They went hand-in-hand with Red Red Meat, in my mind: rock that could only happen in an entirely out-of-focus version of itself.
- Guns N’ Roses (1987 lineup) (2)
I would wait on a peaceful, ruly line for that one.
- Halo of Flies
- The Human League (original)
In the nineties, my band, Ui, played a club called Vera in Groningen, Holland. The owner said The Human League were the loudest band he’s ever booked. (At Vera, bands are allowed to board in rooms on the second floor of the club that are nicer than most people’s apartments.)
- Hüsker Dü (7)
Our winner, and the one band on this list that I’ve seen but could care less about. The recent ATP show where Bob Mould played Hüsker Dü songs with No Age was reasonably fun, and probably more fun than this would be. When I saw them in 1986, they just sounded washed out and sloppy. Sorry, history!
- Jane’s Addiction
- Jawbox
- Kid Creole & the Coconuts (with August Darnell and Andy Hernandez)
I believe they are touring Europe already, though I don’t think Andy Hernandez is with them. (If I Google every single band, this will never get done.)
- Kyuss
I co-sign.
- La Mano Negra
- Leaders of the New School
I think Busta Rhymes is too big and growly to make this work. “Case of the P.T.A.” would not be plausible.
- The Libertines
England, you are crazy.
- Loop
- The Modern Lovers, first incarnation (3)
- The Monks
The Monks could possibly be the most feasible of all suggestions here. Garage rock wears pretty well and doesn’t present the physical demands of thrash or M.C. Hammer routines. But are they all with us still?
Stay tuned for N through Z.
Gerda Taro
Don't know why I it took me a year to discover a link to this Gerda Tara show, but I was totally wowed by the work of this photographer I knew very little about. She was Robert Capa's collaborator/girlfriend and they worked together for only two years before she was killed in the Spanish Civil War just shy of her 27th birthday.More of Taro's story on Wikipedia
Related: The Mexican Suitcase
Filed under: photography
Tags: gerda, photojournalist, spanish civil war, taro, woman
Sponsor:
TWO BLUE CARS: Your kid's favorite shirt.
What Would You Do?
McSweeney's Internet Tendency has a silly item that riffs on the "What would you do for a Klondike Bar?" ad campaign: "Ethical Dilemmas Involving Klondike Bars." Example:
You operate an orphanage and your funding has just been slashed. Kids are now going without dessert. Your friend owns a grocery store and is willing to donate 500 Klondike bars to the orphans if you lie and tell the government that he donated 1,000. What would you do-o-o?
I was a little disappointed that there was no scenario involving a terrorist, his baby, a crowded stadium with a bomb planted in it, and a Klondike Bar. [via The Morning News; photograph: klondikebar.com]
Justice Antonin Scalia Says Some of the Best Minds May Be Wasted on Law
In an interview with C-SPAN, Justice Antonin Scalia once again graced us with his worldview. As usual, it is as beautiful and terrible as the dawn.
The WSJ Law Blog sloughed through the interview transcripts and pulled out this gleaming diamond of truth:
I mean there'd be a, you know, a defense or public defender from Podunk, you know, and this woman is really brilliant, you know. Why isn't she out inventing the automobile or, you know, doing something productive for this society?I mean lawyers, after all, don't produce anything. They enable other people to produce and to go on with their lives efficiently and in an atmosphere of freedom. That's important, but it doesn't put food on the table and there have to be other people who are doing that. And I worry that we are devoting too many of our very best minds to this enterprise.
I have never agreed with Justice Scalia more than I do at this very moment. I ... I've ... got something in my eye.
I move that LSAC must send this quote to anybody that applies to sit for the LSAT. I further move that anybody scoring an IQ above 139 who does not receive a federal circuit clerkship or better must forthwith abandon legal practice and be forced into labor on renewable energy, cancer treatments, or summer blockbuster screenplay editing. Do I have a second?
Scalia: 'We Are Devoting Too Many of Our Best Minds to' Lawyering [WSJ Law Blog]
Earlier: Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia Hates Acronyms, Loves Marisa Tomei
Sponsored Topics: Antonin Scalia - Law - Legal Information - Supreme Court - United States
Ed Levine: Going Where No Food Writer Has Gone Before
Almost every day I pass by Dallas BBQ, and each and every time it's packed. Lunch, dinner, even in between. Even more interestingly, it's packed with an incredibly diverse set of New Yorkers, of every race and ethnicity imaginable. All these folks appear to be having an insanely good time. In fact, it looks like they're having a big old house party -- complete with super-cheap humongous meals, made up mostly of grilled or fried or barbecued meat and foot-high plates of fried accompaniments, and moat-sized multi-colored drinks (with umbrellas) to wash it all down.
Hundreds of people eat at this restaurant every day, and savor every last fried or grilled bite. But nary a food critic or food writer or blogger among them. Until now. The serious eaters hit Dallas BBQ en masse last week, and I for one survived with my palate intact ... and my stomach full for a full week afterwards.
I have an inviolable rule when I order, particularly in restaurants like Dallas BBQ: If any menu item is described as "the best" or "famous," I have to order it.
Dallas BBQ's onion loaf ($5.99) is, according to the menu, the "Best in NYC." I cannot in good conscience tell you that I have had every onion loaf in New York, but damn, this onion loaf is good. It's a crispy ten-inch high mass of greaselessly, lightly battered strands of sweet onion. It's shaped like a Shriner's hat, and with a hole in the middle, it looks like an onion ring bundt cake.A small order of "Famous" Texas Crispy Wings ($7.99) appeared with six cleanly fried, pterodactyl-sized fried chicken wings. I don't know that they deserve to be famous, but they were crispy and crunchy and clearly showed that someone knows how to fry in the restaurant's kitchen.
Chicken tenders ($7.99) also reflected the kitchen's frying abilities, and though they weren't exactly juicy and moist, they did have plenty of crispy, salty flavor.
With our starters, we ordered a Texas-sized, big-as-a-moat Blue Bull ($7.99), a margarita drowned in blue with an extra shot of tequila. Our extremely friendly and knowledgeable server brought it to the table with four umbrellas. The bartender could have fit a couple of more in the glass, believe me.
The rotisseried chicken ($5.99), described as the "very best slow rotisseried BBQ chicken, prepared with no additives or sauces every hour on the hour!", is, alas, not even the best in the 'hood. But it is huge (even the quarter chicken is more than enough to eat), the skin is vaguely crisp, and though the white meat is dry, I've had far worse at twice the price.
The barbecue at Dallas BBQ is not even smoked (it's steamed or baked and then finished on the grill), so it shouldn't really be called barbecue. The baby back ribs ($8.99) come with no hyperbolic menu description, nor should they. They are falling off the bone tender, but they didn't have much pork flavor (baby backs as a rule don't), and all you really taste when you bite into them is the sauce. The beef ribs ($11.99) are gigantic, tender, and messy, thanks to the pool of cloyingly sweet barbecue sauce.
The "New" Texas hot dog ($6.99), served with baked beans, isn't described as the "best" or "famous," but perhaps it should be. It's a grilled all-natural, no preservatives, no nitrates, 12-inch half-pound all beef hot dog that is juicy and garlicky and plenty meaty. It comes with beans and your choice of starch, and at $6.99 it's a ridiculous bargain. The burgers ($7.99 and up with potato or rice) are a half-pound of ground sirloin that our server told us are ground on premises from the steak tips. Alas, the burger joined the ribs in the barely-any-flavor department. Crispy shrimp ($8.99) were kinda crispy, but they were the only thing we ate that tasted as if they had been sitting around the kitchen already fried waiting for someone to order them.
Baked potatoes are huge and tender, though their skin was flaccid. The French Fries were really fine, fresh, skin-on, thick-cut Idahos that are in fact better than Shake Shack's, though I wish their exterior had been as crispy as the Shack's. But the cornbread is sweet and cakey, and should be considered a dessert.
Which is a good thing, because as we found out, there is no dessert served at Dallas BBQ. Our server directed us to the Baskin-Robbins next door. We all just took another bite of the cornbread and washed it down with a big sip of Blue Bull. Voila, dessert. The only other thing you'll need if you have the ribs or chicken is a wet nap -- which do come in handy, but really stink up the place.
After a few meals, I get why Dallas BBQ is always jammed. Inoffensive, somewhat tasty food; huge, strong, multi-colored drinks (that come with multiple umbrellas on request); ridiculously reasonable prices (the price-value ratio is off the charts here); and a party-like atmosphere in which all kinds of people seem to be having a great time eating. I'm not going to spoil the party. I just don't know that I need to return any time soon.
Dallas BBQ
261 Eighth Avenue, New York NY 10011
212-462-0001
Service: Friendly and familiar the first time, off-putting and weird the next
Setting: A big diner with cacti, a concrete ceiling, and reasonably well-spaced tables
Compare It To: Applebee's, Chili's, TGI Friday's
Must-Haves: Hot Dog, Onion Loaf, Chicken Tenders, and yes, a big ol' blue drink
Cost: Twenty bucks will get you enough food for two to share and one of those drinks
Grade: C+
Sports Guy Bill Simmons talks '30 for 30,' his book, TV and more
Back at press tour, I wrote about how excited I was to see ESPN's "30 for 30" documentary series, which premieres Tuesday, October 6 at 8 p.m. with "Kings Ransom," Peter Berg's film about Wayne Gretzky being traded from the Edmonton Oilers to the LA Kings. (Click here for a schedule of the early films in the series.) I've since watched the first four films, and they absolutely lived up to my expectations.
A unified theory of Superman's powers
Here's the abstract of a new paper seeking to explain Superman's powers.
Tags: SupermanSince Time immemorial, man has sought to explain the powers of Kal-El, a.k.a. Superman. Siegel et al. Supposed that His mighty strength stems from His origin on another planet whose density and as a result, gravity, was much higher than our own. Natural selection on the planet of krypton would therefore endow Kal El with more efficient muscles and higher bone density; explaining, to first order, Superman's extraordinary powers. Though concise, this theory has proved inaccurate. It is now clear that Superman is actually flying rather than just jumping really high; and His freeze-breath, x-ray vision, and heat vision also have no account in Seigel's theory.
In this paper we propose a new unfied theory for the source of Superman's powers; that is to say, all of Superman's extraordinary powers are manifestation of one supernatural ability, rather than a host. It is our opinion that all of Superman's recognized powers can be unified if His power is the ability to manipulate, from atomic to kilometer length scales, the inertia of His own and any matter with which He is in contact.
Hungry Tiny Hippo
Check out this baby Pygmy Hippopotamus born at Rotterdam's Blijdorp Zoo. It's hardly larger than a lettuce leaf. There are estimated to be less than 3,000 pygmy hippos, which are native to western Africa, left in the wild.
(via jezebel)
Infoshop Opens in Estonia
I got this forward and it has taken me months to put it up but here its is: a new infoshop A-raamatukogu (A-library)www.araamat.org opened in Estonia this past summer.
They are looking for donations for their library. They accept texts in English, Russian, Finnish and German. Below I have pasted their full announcement:
On the 1th of June 2009 the anarchist/alternative infoshop-library "A-raamatukogu“ (the A-library) will open its doors in Tartu Kultuuritehas (Culture Factory of Tartu, Pikk street 58/60) in Estonia.Estonia is a small (ex-Soviet) country in north-east Europe, near Finland, Russia and Latvia. The A-raamatukogu is situated near the downtown area of Tartu, the second biggest city in Estonia which is known as the "University city“ of the region.
In the summer of 2008 a group of people who are active in local "alternative culture“ scene started to build "Culture Factory of Tartu“ in an old factory building near downtown area of Tartu. There are different collectives and individuals (mainly artists, musicians and university students) involved and many different activities (concerts, free shop, recycle workshop, fleemarkets, community kitchen, exhibitions etc) going on. We were inspired by the DIY atmosphere of the place and decided to rent rooms in the building to build alternative/anarchist library-infoshop.
We, the A-raamatukogu, are about ten young people (mostly university students) and most of us are connected with PunaMust (a small Estonian anarchist network that is gathered around webpage www.punamust.org). We are also closely linked with the people who run squatted social centre Volk in the Tallinn (capital of Estonia).
We don’t have any formal or bureaucratic structure, in the formal stuff (e.g. rent contract, book-keeping and bank account) we are helped by the friendly NGO called Independent Active (www.indyactive.org) but we find it important to point out that Independent Active is not the "owner“ of the A-raamatukogu, the decisions are made directly by the people who are involved in running the place and everybody can take part of it.
The main goal of the A-raamatukogu is to promote anti-authoritarian ideas and to introduce different alternative social, cultural and political movements and to create a space where activists and groups can gather, communicate, share information, prepare for actions or just hang out.
Since A-raamatukogu is an alternative, independent project, which has no support from any larger organization, foundation or institution, our budget is rather small. Mostly we have gathered money for rent and repairs from the donations from our friends and selling self made T-shirts and patches.
All the work done around the A-raamatukogu is voluntary and nobody gets paid for it.
We would be very happy if you could send us books, magazines, DVD-s, pamphlets, zines, posters, stickers etc concerning the following topics:
anarchism, libertarian socialism, anti-capitalism, alternative cultures, radical democracy, anti-fascism, anti-authoritarian left-wing politics, feminism, streetart, environmental issues, DIY, squatting, autonomous spaces, animal rights, veganism, gender issues, anti-GMO etc.
Most of the young people in Estonia can read English, but we would also happily accept materials in Russian, Finnish and in German.
We would also most happily cooperate with similar groups, infoshops, collectives etc around the world. You can contact us via e-mail.
If you happen to visit Estonia you are very welcome to drop by. See you soon!
The A-raamatukogu collective
Webpage: www.araamat.org
Post address:
A-raamatukogu
Tartu Kultuuritehas
Pikk tn 58/60
Tartu 50603
EstoniaMore information about Tartu Kultuuritehas (Culture Factory of Tartu):
http://tartu.kultuuritehas.ee/
Sweater tree
A tree in Baltimore recently was bestowed with its sweater for the colder months. Local knitters constructed a garment specifically for the tree, with the only restriction being that they had to use white, green, and purple yarn. The latest sweater replaces last year's style, which was removed for the dog days.
"We actually made a little bikini for it for the summer, but it fell apart."The sweater tree is an example of a growing urban phenomenon called yarn bombing, aka yarnstorming or graffiti knitting. Yarn bombing is believed to have its roots in Texas, where it was invented as a way for knitters to creatively utilize their unfinished knitting projects. Common targets are telephone poles, trees, and banisters, but in Mexico City, yarn bombers aimed their knitting needles at a more ambitious endeavor: a yarn-covered bus.
Tags: graffiti knitting
Middlewares and welcome back to 2002.
Our Plack/PSGI website is up at plackperl.org. Yeah, read it like "Black Pearl" :)
MIddlewares
Couple of people have shown interest to Plack and wondered ways to extend PSGI applications or Plack servers by patching them. No, most of the time you don't need to, and you can just write middlewares.
So here are some sample Middlewares: RearrangeHeaders that sorts HTTP headers based on "Good Practice" from 199x, SimpleContentFilter that applies regular expression based filters to response body, and RequestResponseWrapper that passes Plack::Request and expects Plack::Response, much like HTTP::Engine.
Pretty powerful.
Note that this RequestResponseWrapper would lose your "application" compatibility with PSGI though. Your app that takes $req and returns $res is not "PSGI app" anymore. It'd be much simpler you do Plack::Request->new(shift) and then returns $res->finalize in your app and that's still PSGI compatible. Take the wrapper as a sample anyway.
Mason and Maypole
On my way home I was thinking which frameworks should be added to the "Supported frameworks" list on our site to be more exciting. I felt a little old but thought of the two big names from pre-Catalyst era, like 2002-4. Mason and Maypole.
So there you go: HTML::Mason::PSGIHandler and Maypole::PSGI. Both uses CGI::PSGI for the easy migration from their CGI equivalent (HTML::Mason::CGIHandler and CGI::Maypole).
Maypole was a little hard to adapt since their list of dispatchers is hardcoded and uses multiple inheritance (injecting @ISA at runtime ... yeah, like old Catalyst) and you can see my semi-rants in the source code, but overall it works pretty nice.
So who's next? Do you have a web framework that can be added to the list?
September 30, 2009
Announcing the TypePad Platform and TypePad Motion
It was almost 8 years ago today that Ben and Mena Trott released Movable Type and helped spark the blogging explosion that followed. Before that time, personal web publishing was largely difficult and expensive, but with MT and the great software and services that followed from Six Apart and others, web publishing became much more accessible and, as a result, social. Today we are announcing some major steps in Six Apart’s continuing mission to make web publishing more accessible and social: the TypePad Platform and TypePad Motion, a new open-source software social application.
The TypePad Platform
In 2003, Six Apart launched TypePad, which quickly became and remains the leading premium hosted blogging service. According to comScore, Six Apart is the leader in the blog category in the US and reaches over 183M unique visitors per month around the world - that’s bigger than MySpace - and TypePad is the cornerstone of Six Apart’s hosted services.
In the last year we’ve rebuilt TypePad from the ground up and introduced social networking features such as profiles, following, microblogging, and status updates to our bloggers. We've invested in making TypePad the most secure, stable, scalable and social blogging platform, but until now the only way to use it was through TypePad.com. Today we are very pleased to announce the launch of the TypePad Platform, where any developer, blogger, publisher, or corporation can use the TypePad “cloud” through our open APIs.
Cloud services didn’t exist in 2001 the way they do today, but now services from Amazon and others make building and launching new web sites much easier and less expensive by providing infrastructure level “cloud” services. Users of Flickr, Facebook and Twitter have transformed the internet by sharing their media and building relationships online, in part because of the flexibility of experiences that those platforms' API have enabled.
We hope to take cloud computing a step further with the TypePad Platform with this “smart cloud” service - combining the flexibility of infrastructure-focused services with the building blocks of our social application platform. Our platform enables developers to use structured object, like blogs, posts, comments, people, activities, groups, and tags, to quickly and inexpensively build next generation social applications on a reliable, secure, and scalable platform.
That all may be a bit too much jargon, I realize, so the bottom line is this: cloud services are transforming how web sites and social applications are being built, and we want to help move this trend forward by opening up TypePad’s APIs. We hope to dramatically lower barriers for those trying to get started on a shoestring to build the next Twitter, Facebook, or YouTube.
For larger publishers and Internet businesses, we see the TypePad Platform as new way to incorporate blogs and social networking into their sites - offering an alternative to completely local software solutions or completely hosted SaaS solutions. With the TypePad Platform, publishers can use the presentation layer and templates of their choice - be it via MT, PHP, Django, Java, etc. - while not having to install and support an expensive back end.
For personal bloggers and TypePad users, opening up our APIs means that TypePad will be built into applications that will help the bloggers and their readers, paving the way for more applications that enhance TypePad functionality. For our larger TypePad customers it opens up a large set of possibilities about how they can integrate their TypePad blogs into their existing web sites. For our Movable Type and Six Apart Services clients, this opens up many more ways that TypePad can be used in conjunction with, rather than an alternative to, Movable Type or other installed blogging platforms.
The TypePad Developer ProgramTo help folks get started using the TypePad Platform, we’ve launched the TypePad Developer Program to provide developers with a free beta version, or Developer Preview, of the TypePad API, available today. Commercial versions of the TypePad Platform will come later, but the TypePad API for developers is free. Developers will find documentation, a forum, mailing list and group where they can get their questions answered quickly at developer.typepad.com.
TypePad MotionTo show what the TypePad Platform can do, today we are announcing and open sourcing TypePad Motion as the inaugural open source application built by Six Apart for the TypePad platform. Typepad Motion is a microblogging app evolved from the Pownce codebase & community, It’s written in Python using the Django framework, making it extremely easy to build and customize. It’s a great example of how developers can use TypePad for the heavy lifting without sacrificing the flexibility and control of an entirely separate presentation layer, like Django, to maintain templates and build pages.
A TypePad Motion site is a place where members come together to share notes, files, photos, videos and audio with others and featured users can aggregate all of their activity around the web onto the TypePad Motion site, keeping their fans or followers up-to-date on their activities. Several celebrities have integrated TypePad Motion sites into their branded websites, such as Zachary Quinto (Star Trek, Heroes) and Ryan Star.
For more information about TypePad Motion, please visit typepad.com/go/motion.
This opens up a new chapter for TypePad and Six Apart, and it’s just a start. The TypePad Platform is new and now primarily for developers who wish to preview and test the service. We’d love your feedback. It is Six Apart’s continuing mission to dramatically reduce the cost and time to market while increasing the capability and scalability in building social applications. We’re hoping to make web publishing even more accessible and social and we hope you will join us.
Announcing the TypePad Platform and TypePad Motion
It was almost 8 years ago today that Ben and Mena Trott released Movable Type and helped spark the blogging explosion that followed. Before that time, personal web publishing was largely difficult and expensive, but with MT and the great software and services that followed from Six Apart and others, web publishing became much more accessible and, as a result, social. Today we are announcing some major steps in Six Apart’s continuing mission to make web publishing more accessible and social: the TypePad Platform and TypePad Motion, a new open-source software social application.
The TypePad Platform
In 2003, Six Apart launched TypePad, which quickly became and remains the leading premium hosted blogging service. According to comScore, Six Apart is the leader in the blog category in the US and reaches over 183M unique visitors per month around the world - that’s bigger than MySpace - and TypePad is the cornerstone of Six Apart’s hosted services.
In the last year we’ve rebuilt TypePad from the ground up and introduced social networking features such as profiles, following, microblogging, and status updates to our bloggers. We've invested in making TypePad the most secure, stable, scalable and social blogging platform, but until now the only way to use it was through TypePad.com. Today we are very pleased to announce the launch of the TypePad Platform, where any developer, blogger, publisher, or corporation can use the TypePad “cloud” through our open APIs.
Cloud services didn’t exist in 2001 the way they do today, but now services from Amazon and others make building and launching new web sites much easier and less expensive by providing infrastructure level “cloud” services. Users of Flickr, Facebook and Twitter have transformed the internet by sharing their media and building relationships online, in part because of the flexibility of experiences that those platforms' API have enabled.
We hope to take cloud computing a step further with the TypePad Platform with this “smart cloud” service - combining the flexibility of infrastructure-focused services with the building blocks of our social application platform. Our platform enables developers to use structured object, like blogs, posts, comments, people, activities, groups, and tags, to quickly and inexpensively build next generation social applications on a reliable, secure, and scalable platform.
That all may be a bit too much jargon, I realize, so the bottom line is this: cloud services are transforming how web sites and social applications are being built, and we want to help move this trend forward by opening up TypePad’s APIs. We hope to dramatically lower barriers for those trying to get started on a shoestring to build the next Twitter, Facebook, or YouTube.
For larger publishers and Internet businesses, we see the TypePad Platform as new way to incorporate blogs and social networking into their sites - offering an alternative to completely local software solutions or completely hosted SaaS solutions. With the TypePad Platform, publishers can use the presentation layer and templates of their choice - be it via MT, PHP, Django, Java, etc. - while not having to install and support an expensive back end.
For personal bloggers and TypePad users, opening up our APIs means that TypePad will be built into applications that will help the bloggers and their readers, paving the way for more applications that enhance TypePad functionality. For our larger TypePad customers it opens up a large set of possibilities about how they can integrate their TypePad blogs into their existing web sites. For our Movable Type and Six Apart Services clients, this opens up many more ways that TypePad can be used in conjunction with, rather than an alternative to, Movable Type or other installed blogging platforms.
The TypePad Developer Program
TypePad Motion
A TypePad Motion site is a place where members come together to share notes, files, photos, videos and audio with others and featured users can aggregate all of their activity around the web onto the TypePad Motion site, keeping their fans or followers up-to-date on their activities. Several celebrities have integrated TypePad Motion sites into their branded websites, such as Zachary Quinto (Star Trek, Heroes) and Ryan Star.
For more information about TypePad Motion, please visit typepad.com/go/motion.
This opens up a new chapter for TypePad and Six Apart, and it’s just a start. The TypePad Platform is new and now primarily for developers who wish to preview and test the service. We’d love your feedback. It is Six Apart’s continuing mission to dramatically reduce the cost and time to market while increasing the capability and scalability in building social applications. We’re hoping to make web publishing even more accessible and social and we hope you will join us.
Your Favorite New Blog Platform For The Next Five
The Six Apart kids gave me a preview of this last week, and it's out now: Typepad Motion. It wraps the social graph onto your blog platform. (It essentially combines Typepad and Pownce, which they bought almost a year ago. Another analogy might be "a cleaner, more extensible Ning.")
September Posts at HarvardBusiness.org
Here’s what I covered over at my weekly HarvardBusiness.org blog Work Smarter this past month:
- How to Secure Your Browser’s Saved Passwords–Don’t let a thief or anyone else who uses your computer log into your accounts because you’ve saved passwords there.
- Turn an Email Outage into a Productivity Boost–Email server out? Good. Now it’s time to get things done.
- How to Send and Receive Text Messages for Free–When your text messaging bill’s through the roof, use these online products to get your SMS on without breaking the bank.
- Squeeze Every Last Drop Out of Your Laptop’s Battery–Proper care, feeding, and handling of your notebook battery can keep you up and running longer.
Chronicle vows to 'smash' 'naive' new media organizations
Shared by EveIn a memo sent to the SF Chronicle’s Metro staff on Friday, Metro Section Editor Audrey Cooper took a sharply defensive stance against what she, perhaps, views as the threat of local financier Warren Hellman’s much ballyhooed plans to launch a locally focused, online news organization.
Made it on the Media Workers blog! I can die happy. I am not kidding, I am thrilled.
Report: Comcast Buying NBC for $35 Billion. Comcast: "Inaccurate" (Peter Kafka/MediaMemo)
Peter Kafka / MediaMemo:
Report: Comcast Buying NBC for $35 Billion. Comcast: “Inaccurate” — Here's the big media deal everyone has been waiting for. Or at least, here's the report: Sharon Waxman of TheWrap reports that cable giant Comcast (CMCSA) is buying all of NBC Universal from GE (GE) for $35 billion.
The best movies of 2009
Too soon for that title? Anyway, Hitfix takes an early look at the Oscar contenders for 2010. Among them, Clint Eastwood's Invictus, Star Trek, Where the Wild Things Are, Malick's The Tree of Life, The Road, Amelia, and The Lovely Bones.
Tags: best of best of 2009 lists movies Oscars
Quick note on new gig
For those who know, this summer has been busy for me: I stepped down from my fun job as Editor-in-Chief at Nokia Conversations and I moved my family (and dog) from Finland to the US. As if this were not enough, I have left Nokia today and have started to work at Children's Hospital Boston.
I am now Senior Web Producer for Children's Hospital Trust, the fundraising arm of Children's Hospital Boston. In addition to media production, especially videos, I'm leading the Trust's engagement with patients, families, and advocates through online social networking services (social media marketing and fundraising, similar to what I did at Nokia).
I'm excited to be doing more than selling electronics. And it's great to be back at Children's (it's where I was a bit before I joined Nokia).
I'll have more to say in future. For now, I'm sprucing up and stoking the Trust's presence on Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter (the social media toolkit version 2009, of course) among other things. And they will have me making videos like crazy.
The funny thing is that it's like starting all over again, training a corporation new to the joys of the conversational Web.
I haven't updated my station identification yet to reflect these changes, but will soon. Until then, my about page says enough.
More later. For sure.
If 30% is good enough for Apple in the App Store, it should be good enough for dropped calls on AT&T, right?
Filed under: iPhone
File this one under AYFKMWTS (are you freaking kidding me with this stuff?): a Gizmodo reader, aggravated with an unacceptably high rate of dropped calls on his iPhone, took it to a New York City Apple Store to have it checked for issues. The call dump statistics revealed a 22% drop rate on calls, which most of us would call "wicked awful" -- but not Apple and AT&T.
No, in this particular case the Genius told our hapless iPhone owner that he should count himself lucky, as Apple's baseline stat for dropped calls in NYC is a blistering thirty percent. Yes, almost one in three calls on an iPhone in the Big Apple will end with frustration, and that's just OK with everyone.
Well, not with us. Combined with the "five bars, no calls" dead zones and mysterious "call failed" issues, it must be said: this phone is not getting it done when it comes to the whole phone thing, at least on AT&T's network in the city that never sleeps. Or, for that matter, makes an uninterrupted cell call.
[via Engadget]TUAWIf 30% is good enough for Apple in the App Store, it should be good enough for dropped calls on AT&T, right? originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Wed, 30 Sep 2009 15:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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We're From The Militia and We're Here to Help
This is truly one of the more bizarre stories I've seen in a while.
A shadowy security company, which seems to have no history and which no one seems to know much about, has secured a contract to take over a jail in the small town of Hardin, Montana.
Only the jail has no inmates and the company -- American Police Force (you can see their oddly Balkan crest in the pic to the left) -- won't say what it is they plan to do with it. And then there's the stuff that's been freaking out the locals. As Justin Elliott puts it in our post, "residents of Hardin, MT, were alarmed last week when executives from the firm, American Police Force, showed up in the town, which does not have its own police department, with Mercedes SUVs bearing "City Of Hardin Police Department" decals."
The shadowiness of the whole enterprise has spawned a series of conspiracy theories on the left and the right. But it mainly seems like it's some guys with a bunch of guns who've found some way to make a lot of money. They just won't say what. At least not yet.
So where exactly is APF getting the money for the venture? The company's spokesperson says they don't plan to answer the question. And who's the spokesperson? That would be Becky Shay, who used to cover APF as a reporter for the local paper until about a week ago.
Here's the rest of our report.
Late Update: Wow, it gets even better with APF. If you want to overthrow a small third world country? Check. Have them tail your cheating spouse and catch him/her in flagrante? Yep, got you covered there too.
New Fonts: A Graphic Designer’s Perspective
Most graphic designers choose the fonts that best fit their projects. Brian Hennings does the opposite: he chooses the projects that best fit the fonts. A resident designer at H&FJ, Brian shares with me the responsibility of creating all of the sample art you’ll find on this site. His is a strange universe of the fictitious: signage programs for mythical cities, book jackets for unwritten novels, product literature for items you cannot buy, broadcast graphics for live sporting events that you can’t quite identify. (They might have a ball, horses, cars, rifles, or all of the above.) His fake cookbook recipes have immaculate typography, but I wouldn’t recommend trying to cook from any of them.
Two weeks ago, H&FJ released our new Tungsten font family, accompanied by an unusually large collection of sample art: Brian and I just couldn’t put the new fonts down. The feedback we received was extraordinary in both its kindness and its volume, and I was especially happy to see so many designers specifically mention the art that we’d worked so hard to create. Since Brian’s job gives him a unique perspective on typography — plus enviable access to fonts that the rest of the world won’t see for years — I asked him to share some of his observations about the process: what it’s like to use a new font that no one’s ever used, what it tells you about itself, and what it reveals about typography in general. Without further ado, here’s Brian... —JH
What's Wrong With This Picture?
How is it possible that the fashion world continues to enable (if not encourage by its silence) its star designers to exclude people of color on the runways and in their ad campaigns? These shows are looked at by zillions of people, and along the way set the example for companies and fashion magazines all over the world. IT IS SHOCKING AND REALLY MAKES ME CRAZY. What's wrong with everybody? Look around. Do you only see white women in the stores shopping? Do you only see white women on the streets looking good? I could show you tons of other examples, but above you can see the entire casting for the last Jil Sander show as an example of what I'm talking about. Here are photos of EVERY MODEL that walked the runway in the show last week in Milan. Need I say more? Can the talented designer Raf Simmons really not see how hurtful this kind of casting is? Why isn't anyone but Bethann Hardison talking about this????
Oh Hey, What the Heck is Up, Rene Russo?
What is going on, Brentwood? I know it is rough times out there, but I cannot help but wonder what did occur. With you and your career and stuff. Your daughter should be graduating high school around about now, and you are 55. A very hot 55! We all know women can’t open a movie, and it is irritating, even if you are whatever, Megan Fox. But you were making them fork over money for the tickets pretty good for a spell there. And these days your husband isn’t really working either! Maybe you are the two people in the world who took my advice: have a good time, make some money, and get the hell out, before it becomes a deadening obsession with the material world. Maybe you are on a beach now. I’m not! Yet you are still retaining Lisa Kasteler as your publicist, and you are still on the CAA list. And I saw you did some odd fashion ad campaign over the winter. Whatever, I liked you in the movies. You always seemed like you were enjoying yourself, you looked like you had a secret. Maybe the movies did not like you in them, though. Stupid movies! Anyway, I was just wondering if you are working on something fun, like maybe some web shorts for the YouTube or maybe a book of poetry. WRITE ME BACK IF YOU WANT.
Baseball Cards Facing Extinction?
Once again, our beloved hobby is in the news and not for anything positive. As it turns out, sales of baseball cards are down an astounding 80% from the 90’s and there are just 500 card shops remaining in an industry that once had over 5,000.
Blame the economy, eBay, “high-end” releases but obviously something has gone terribly wrong and has yet to be fixed. In a day when movie studios create blockbuster films for $200 million and then sell DVDs for under $20 dollars, there should be no reason a box of trading cards cost more than a movie, video game, and even consoles.
There have been some great releases by both Topps Company and Upper Deck this year but clearly, there is just too much out there. Did we really need Ballpark Collection & Ticket To Stardom? Baseball card technology is at an all-time high and today’s cards look amazing but at what point do you decide to pull back and go back to the basics?
No one is saying cut out “high-end” products and cater to set builders. At the same time, no one is suggesting that we go back 25 years to when cards were “just a hobby” but if we don’t turn back the clock to a time when design and photography mattered (not plain white jersey relics), we are going to lose this hobby to Xbox360, if it hasn’t already happened.
How do you feel about the baseball card industry today?
Apple Genius Bar: iPhones' 30% Call Drop Is "Normal" in New York - Apple - Gizmodo
reader Manoj took his iPhone to the Genius Bar to have it looked at because it was dropping calls left and right, and AT&T swore stuff was totally kosher on their end, so he thought something was wrong with his phone. After doing a stat dump, the Genius showed Manoj that his iPhone had actually dropped 22 percent of calls. The jawdropper: The Genius told Manoj that's actually excellent compared to most people in the New York area, where a 30 percent dropped call rate is the average. There was nothing Apple could do for Manoj. His phone was totally fine. Which means there's nothing Apple can do for rest of us. via gizmodo.com Apple continues their engagement of blogs through intentional leaks and staged support engagements. Brilliant.
Is Sullivan St. Bakery Kicking Chelsea Seniors to the Curb?
According to a sad and sweet post on Vanishing New York, Sullivan Street Bakery is planning on opening up shop on 24th and 9th. Great news for Jim Lahey lovers! Terrible news for the bakery that's already there and its senior clientele, which uses the space as a meeting spot. According to the story, 47 year-old bakery Les Desirs Patisserie recently got word from its landlords that their lease would not be renewed at the end of October, and neighbors say it's because a new location of Sullivan Street Bakery is moving in. Cue the sad quote from one of the seniors:
"It gives you a reason to get out of the house...If you don't show up here for a few days--can you believe it?--your phone starts ringing!"...I asked them where they will go, once their bakery is gone. "McDonald's,' Betty said, 'That's all we can afford around here now.'Sad. But think of all the delicious bread that will be in the neighborhood! JVNY has some tips for how the place can be saved, so click through. · Les Desirs [JVNY] · Les Desirs Patisserie [Official Site]
The English Patient
There’s a rather remarkable letter in the current London Review of Books concerning the treatment of Britain’s mentally ill. It begins this way:
I have been in and out of NHS mental hospitals for more than forty years. The first, following a suicide attempt, was Bethlem Royal, the old Bedlam, by then moved to a huge semi-rural site near Beckenham. On arrival my first feeling was of immense relief; I was in a safe place and didn’t have to worry any more. One almost never saw a psychiatrist; ‘treatment’ consisted of tranquillisers that kept one calm and anti-depressants that did nothing at all; this was in the days before Prozac. But the nurses were friendly and spent all day with the patients, chatting, playing games (Scrabble with schizophrenics can be very entertaining), going for walks in the grounds, even cooking meals with us. The male wing had a full-size snooker table and the female a grand piano, though the eccentricities of women playing snooker and men the piano were tolerated. After the first week or two I could even go for unaccompanied walks in the grounds. It would have been a very nice place to stay if one weren’t mad.You can find the rest here. (Scroll down to “Keep me in!”) It is surely one of the more interesting things you’ll read all day.
Topps National Chicle Preview
This morning, Topps released new images of their upcoming National Chicle Football brand through their Twitter account.
The product will feature artwork by popular artists like Brian Kong, Paul Lemka, and Don Higgins among others.
2009 Topps Chicle is modeled after the 1930’s Chicle releases like this 1935 card currently on eBay.
No other information is available at this time.
Color of Empire
Color of Empire. “Iranian activists — trying to blanket New York City with their trademark green color — lobbied to bathe the top of the Empire State Building in green light all this week during their rallies against Iran’s president, who is visiting the United Nations. The request was rejected. But on Thursday, to the protesters’ delight, it will be green anyway, for another reason: an ‘Emerald Gala’ for the 70th anniversary of the film ‘The Wizard of Oz.’”
Today, the building will be lit red and yellow in honor of the 60th anniversary of communist China.
Bookcase stairs
A couple in London have found the ultimate space-saving solution for a city-dwelling book lover: a staircase bookshelf. UK-based Levitate Architects came up with the page-turning passage as a unique way to augment a loft sleeping space in the attic with discreet storage. If they could create a record crate bathroom, I'd be ready to move in.
Tags: architecture books stairs UK
Too Hot in the Kitchen
It seems that article advocating a military coup against President Obama was too much even for Newsmax. The article appears to have been taken down this morning. We'll be following up on this shortly.
Rock Paper Scissors: Ouija street
Knickertwist used an old Ouija board to make this wonderful collection of chunky houses. She cut the board up to use as the base of the houses, and then added tags, buttons, stamps, parts of jewelry, and some old rusty bits. A few of the houses even feature some spooky bones. Be sure to check her post to see individual photos of a few of the houses. It’s getting close to Halloween; beware of Ouija street!
I Woke Up Early On My Born-Day...
Heh. Except I'm 34, not 20. And happy for it. I wasn't very good at being 20. But I was a decent 33. I think I'll do alright at 34.
Folks I'm going to take off today. I am going to go out and watch the people. Next year, I'm throwing a party. They are going to play Passion Pit, Parliament and Outkast.
I'm setting up an open thread for this afternoon.
Drawing: Week 4
This one is ink on paper, about 10" x 14"
Send Mets A Valentine
Bobby Valentine's days in Japan are over. As expected, the Chiba Lotte Marines ended their relationship with Bobby V. ESPN announced yesterday that the former Met manager will work as an in-studio analyst during this year's post-season.
In a conference call, Valentine also labeled the 2009 Mets campaign a "tragedy," and said no one could have fixed this team.
When asked about returning to the Mets, Valentine sidestepped the issue.
I've been giving this alot of thought lately. Jerry Manuel is a smart guy and can't be held accountable for the injury disasters that doomed this team.
However, there are ailments with this team that go beyond hamstrings and tendons. These guys are dispirited. Veterans and rookies alike fail to run out ground balls, make idiotic basrunning blunders and in general, perform like they have nothing to play for. Willie Randolph got whacked for failing to inspire his team. After a season and a half, Manuel hasn't rallied the boys any better.
The players need a kick in the tail. And the Mets need to give fans a compelling reason to come back to Citi Field in 2010. New Mets uniforms just won't cut it.
So bring back Bobby Valentine. Sure the guy was controversial and maybe a bit nuts. But he got guys like Benny Agbayani to play like a Hawaiian Babe Ruth. And he evokes memories of a winning tradition that has been missing for years.
Here's another idea...on Monday, ownership, Minaya and Manuel are going to meet and start planning for 2010. Chances are most of the coaches will be let go. If the Wilpons aren't prepared to fire Manuel, then make Valentine 3rd base coach. That would at least motivate Jerry Manuel to manage better! And Bobby V is just crazy enough to take that job.
Baked Buttered Corn
Photos by Donna
When the corn gets really fat and starchy and less tender than when it was in its August glory, one of the dishes I look forward to is baked buttered corn. It’s sweet and rich, almost custardy and hugely comforting. And it couldn’t be easier. Even that crusty stuff on the side is like candy. You'll be scraping every morsel.
These are the ingredients for four servings:- 8 ears of corn
- 4 tablespoons butter, cut in 4 pieces
- salt and pepper to taste
It’s the technique that makes it such a cool dish.
Scrape 6 ears of corn using a corn cutter, so the kernels are opened and all their sweet starchy juices fall into a bowl (you can also slice the kernels with a knife and scrape the ears that way or you could probably use a box grater; but I love my corn scraper, pictured here; it's one of the few unitaskers I’m devoted to). Cut the corn from the remaining two ears into the same bowl. Season well with salt and pepper. Pour the corn into a baking dish (choose a dish or individual ramekins that will give you a depth of a couple inches). Push the butter into the corn and bake uncovered at 425 for 30-40 minutes.
The starch thickens the corn juice into what is nearly a custard holding the whole kernels. The flavor is pure deep corn, but not light and fresh like quickly boiled corn on the cob—fresh yes, but with deeper muskier notes that come from long cooking and the changes in the sugars. The taste is unique, and, for me, one of the great pleasures of summer’s segue into fall.I usually just put it all in a baking dish and scatter chunks of butter. For last night’s dinner, I made individual pots. If you must garnish this with some green, try a sprinkle of minced tarragon, which is a amazing with corn (though parsley and cilantro also go well).And don't waste those cobs. They will make an incomparably sweet corn stock that can be used wherever you might be tempted to use that nasty Swanson's "broth." (Sorry if you like that stuff. I can't stand it. Why? Taste corn cob stock and you'll why.) Save it and use it as the base for a corn chowder. Make a corn risotto with it. It's fabulous. You'll quickly rue all the cobs you've thoughtlessly thrown in the garbage over the years.
Another cool thing to do with corn, while I'm at it, is to cook it on the cob, then shock it in ice water. When it's chilled, cut it off the cob. Much of the corn will stay connected in sheets. They make an excellent garnish for soups and salads.
I love corn. Corn is my favorite time of year.
Apologies To The French
A good point from comments about generalizing:In other news Woody Allen has signed a petition claiming Polanski's arrest is an outrage. These fools are lacking the self-awareness gene. The press is going to ask Barack about this. It's a Sista Souljah move waiting to happen.Marc Laffineur, the vice-president of the French assembly and a member of President Nicolas Sarkozy's ruling center-right party, the UMP, took issue with the French culture and foreign minister's remarks supporting Mr. Polanski, saying "the charge of raping a child 13 years old is not something trivial, whoever the suspect is."
Within the Green party, Daniel Cohn-Bendit -- a French deputy in the European parliament whose popularity is rising -- also criticized Sarkozy administration officials for leaping too quickly to Mr. Polanski's side despite the serious nature of his crime. On the extreme right, the father and daughter politicians Jean-Marie and Marine Le Pen also attacked the ministers, saying they were supporting "a criminal pedophile in the name of the rights of the political-artistic class..."The mood was even more hostile in blogs and e-mails to newspapers and news magazines. Of the 30,000 participants in an online poll by the French daily Le Figaro, more than 70 percent said Mr. Polanski, 76, should face justice. And in the magazine Le Point, more than 400 letter writers were almost universal in their disdain for Mr. Polanski.
That contempt was not only directed at Mr. Polanski, but at the French class of celebrities -- nicknamed Les People -- who are part of Mr. Polanski's rarefied Parisian world. Letter writers to Le Point scorned Les People as the "crypto-intelligentsia of our country" who deliver "eloquent phrases that defy common sense."
I seem to have mistaken "Les People" for "the people." My bad.
The still from today’s Rocketboom cracks me up. via:...
The still from today’s Rocketboom cracks me up.
Video: Giant Pancake at the Gizmodo Gallery
What do people do while waiting for an incredibly long pancake to form? Keep reminding each other "this is so cool" followed by, "this is stupid guys, this is just stupid." Make noises. Search for more plates. Crack that's-what-she-said jokes. Wish for three arms. Keep looking for plates.
And when the pancake is done forming? Roll the snake of a thing up and take a jaw-stretching bite (probably worth three pancakes alone). The folks behind the Gizmodo Gallery, an interactive wonderland of spiffy contraptions in New York City recently, decided hey, let's make a stupidly long pancake. The video, after the jump.
Giant Pancake at the Gizmodo Gallery
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A little bit of Hollywood on Avenue A
Well, let's keep the old movie theater theme going this week... Take a look at East Village Farms on Avenue A between Seventh Street and Sixth Street...and you'll likely be able tell that it used to be a movie theater...
According to the always-reliable Cinema Treasures:Located on an ever-busy stretch of Avenue A, in the heart of the East Village, this theater is easy to miss. Opened as the Avenue A Theatre in 1926, it was operated by RKO, followed by Loew's, and was closed in 1959.
Today, it's merely a receptacle for retail space on the former orchestra level of the remains of the original auditorium, which have been converted into a health-oriented grocery store called the East Village Farm. The theater's lobby was also converted into retail space, but has been empty for several years.
Like other theaters in this area, the theater's auditorium runs parallel to the street, with a narrow entrance on Avenue A. Much of the theatre's exterior has survived, including its emergency staircase. The decorations in the auditorium are thought to survive, above the false ceiling of the ground floor store.
One of the Cinema Treasures commenters got a peak inside at the mysterious upstairs...perhaps this is where the never-ending supply of sea salt chips are stored...
And here's what the Hollywood looked like circa 1949:
Photos via Cinema Treasures commenters.
I’m Reading: about Cheating on the Mets; Cubs; & Callus
For more on last night’s loss to the Nationals, read Brooklyn Met Fan, Mets Today, Amazin Avenue and Mets Fans Forever.
Michael Ganci of the Daily Stache reminds Mets fans that things could be worse, we could be Cubs fans.
Jason Fry of Faith and Fear in Flushing has had enough baseball for 2009, writing, “I just want the embarrassment and anger to be taken away until I’ve built up six months of desperately needed emotional callus.”
Lastly, Coop of My Summer Family is cheating on the Mets with the Angels.
September 29, 2009
Where are the Novice Mentoring Opportunities?
Today I helped a lurker in #parrot find a productive task.
He's kept an eye on Parrot for several years, but today he asked if there was anything he could do to help. I walked him through getting the source code and suggested an introductory task of an hour or so. At least two other developers gave him other potential tasks.
Any community-driven project of reasonable size has several small tasks suitable for a novice. We're fortunate in Parrot that we have plenty of opportunities for people who know Perl 5 or C or Perl 6 or virtual machines or want to learn any of them -- as well as technologies like parsers, opcode dispatch, garbage collection, JIT, installers, and more. We add a new committer every couple of months. We take mentoring very seriously.
As nice as this is for the Parrot project, it's a small part of the entire Perl ecosystem. (Some committers have little interest in the Perl ecosystem itself -- they care more for Parrot as a free software VM unbeholden to corporate interests or a practical demonstration of new ideas in compiler technology or the promise of radical language interoperability or powerful tools for developing little and large languages or an excuse to use what they learned in computer science classes or....). If there are a million people who've written one or more lines of Perl code in the past ten years, maybe a thousand of them have sufficient interest in Parrot and related projects that they may one day contribute a patch or a bug report or a FAQ.
That leaves a million or so other people as potential contributors.
I can think of plenty of opportunities for them to help the Perl ecosystem with an afternoon of time:
- Add a test to a favorite CPAN module
- Triage bugs in a CPAN module or other Perl project
- Test DarkPAN code against bleadperl
- Add to the Perl 5 Wiki
- Review the Perl 6 synopsis
- Join/start/lead/speak at a Perl Mongers group
- Mentor a novice developer
- Teach a Perl class or lead a study group at a local community college
There are many more possibilities. The question "What is there to do?" doesn't interest me, at least in comparison to a deeper question.
How do we connect those million developers with these possibilities?
Google Docs adds free OCR conversion API
throw it into the OCR toolbox
Upgrade to MovableType 4.32 with Zemanta plugin
Just get the notice that the SixApart released MovableType 4.32. It is a bug fix release with Zemanta plugin.
For me, only Zemanta plugin is the bright point of upgrade.
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Are You a Night Baker?
Night muffins. Why wait until morning? [Photograph: Robyn Lee]
Oh, how well I can relate to this passage from the Washington Post:
It is well past 9 p.m. I am dreaming about dough and batter, yet I am not asleep. The night is still young for obsessed bakers like me who enjoy the tranquilizing act of stirring a brownie batter, kneading a batch of yeast dough or tossing together a quick bread before bedtime.
Like Lisa Yockelson, the author of this piece, I too am a night baker. Between work and busy weekends, the only time I find to whip up a batch of cookies is late in the evening. I may be a bit more prone to burning myself, I may blow a healthy day on a few goodies, and my dreams might not get any less crazy. But anything from the oven just tastes better around midnight. Or a few hours later.
What about you? Are you a night baker?
Try Coding Dear Boy
Kellan: "We generally try do the dumbest thing that will work first. And that's usually as far as we get. Almost everything we do is pretty straightforward, and as such is well documented around the Web, sometimes by us, generally by others. And when we do get fiendishly clever, as we do now and again, it's usually a highly tuned (read idiosyncratic) solution for the problems we're trying to solve.â€
Metric at Oran Mor
Metric at Oran Mor, originally uploaded by linda says.Cool picture!
YUI Theater — Tom Preston-Werner, Chris Wanstrath and Scott Chacon: “Git, GitHub and Social Coding”
Dav invited the GitHub team down to Yahoo! recently to talk about one of our favorite subjects (Git) and one of our favorite sites (GitHub). Tom Preston-Werner, Chris Wanstrath and Scott Chacon all stopped by and conducted an excellent tag-team tech talk. Video from that session is now up on YUI Theater with a full transcript. Thanks to the GitHub guys for coming down and letting us share this content with everyone on video.
If the embed below doesn’t show up in your RSS reader-of-choice, be sure to click through for the high-res, transcripted video page:
src="http://cosmos.bcst.yahoo.com/up/ypp/default/player.swf" type="application/x-shockwave-flash"
flashvars="vid=15004396&autoPlay=0">
- Download video (m4v)
- A high-resolution, transcripted version of this talk is available on the YUI Theater site
Other Recent YUI Theater Videos:
- Nicholas C. Zakas: Scalable JavaScript Application Architecture
- Isaac Schlueter and Matt Hackett: Server-Side JavaScript
- Douglas Crockford: The JSON Saga
- Jonathan LeBlanc: YQL and YUI
- Satyen Desai: YUI3: Design Goals and Architecture
Subscribing to YUI Theater:
Movable Type 4.32 Bug-fix Release + Zemanta plugin
Many of you are looking forward to using MT5 exclusively, but truthfully you may be content with MT4 or maybe you’re unable to upgrade because a plugin you rely upon may not yet be ported to MT5.
So until MT5 is solid and there is little demand for MT4, Six Apart will continue to release new versions of MT4.x as necessary to provide fixes for various security issues and bugs which are major pain points. Small features may be potentially included as well.
- Download MTOS-4.32-en [zip] [tar.gz] [other languages]
MT4.32 fixes a handful of minor bugs which are detailed in the Movable Type 4.32 release notes.
One of the commits in MT4.32 was to bundle the Zemanta plugin. Zemanta has committed to supporting the development of Movable Type; what better partnership than that of a content management system and a service to recommend quality related-content?
While it may not be useful for every blogger, it can be very helpful in the case where you need an image, links to related articles, help with tags for an entry, etc to have a more compelling blog entry. Check out the Zemanta FAQ for more info on how Zemanta’s services may be useful for you or your bloggers. All support or technical questions regarding Zemanta or the Zemanta Plug-in for MovableType should be forwarded to support@zemanta.com.
Zemanta not for you? There are many ways to disable the Zemanta plugin additionally anyone with file-system access can remove the Zemanta plugin from the
pluginsdirectory within the MT install.Also, you don’t need MT4.32 to use the Zemanta plugin, you can also download Zemanta from the plugin directory.
One known issue which wasn’t in the Zemanta FAQ:
For internal Movable Type deployments behind the firewall the Zemanta functionality will not be available. This will not have impact the operation of Movable Type. However, administrators may see the error message “Can’t connect to Zemanta API service” in the Movable Type system log. To avoid seeing this error, the plug-in should be disabled by the administrator as described above.
Hope the fixes in MT4.32 are useful. If there is a bug or patch that you want committed in a future version of MT4.x
MT5 Beta 3 should be available tomorrow.
kottke.org visitor trends and statistics
Daring Fireball, Talking Points Memo, Technologizer, and Macworld recently posted some information about what operating systems and browsers their readers are using. Here's the report for kottke.org.
OS statistics
OS Now 6 mo 1 yr 1.5 yr 2 yr 2.5 yr All-time Windows 54.1% 56.5% 63.4% 63.3% 65.6% 70.1% 62.5% Mac 40.2% 38.2% 31.7% 32.2% 29.9% 27.2% 32.9% Linux 2.5% 2.9% 3.2% 3.4% 4.2% 2.4% 3.1% iPhone 2.3% 1.6% 1.2% 0.6% - - 0.9% The general trends are obvious here. Mac usage among kottke.org readers has risen -- over the past year in particular -- while Windows usage has fallen by the same amount. Forty percent of all kottke.org readers now use a Mac.
The adoption rate of Snow Leopard (OS X 10.6) by kottke.org readers is less than that of Daring Fireball readers. Of Mac users who visit kottke.org, 47.4% are on 10.5, 34.4% are on 10.6, 8.1% on 10.4, 4.0% on 10.4 (PPC) and 3.7% on 10.5 (PPC). Among Windows visitors, 61.9% are still using XP compared to 32.6% on Vista.
Browser statistics
Browser Now 6 mo 1 yr 1.5 yr 2 yr 2.5 yr All-time Firefox 44.6% 46.1% 50.4% 48.9% 47.0% 50.1% 47.9% Safari 27.9% 25.4% 17.3% 17.7% 15.9% 13.7% 19.1% IE 18.5% 21.3% 25.9% 28.7% 31.1% 32.2% 27.0% Chrome 5.6% 3.7% 2.8% - - - 1.8% The numbers for Firefox and IE are falling while Safari and Chrome usage are surging. The Safari nummbers are surprising to me...Safari is not a new browser but its usage by kottke.org readers has increased by more than 60% in the past year. I predict Chrome will surge in the next 12 months to overtake IE.
Two miscellaneous things
1. Google is ruling the search space more than ever. 93.2% of the incoming search traffic to kottke.org comes from Google. That's up from 91.2% a year ago and 83.7% two years ago (!!). Bing is second with 3.4% (MSN and Live combined for 5% two years ago) and Yahoo is a very sad third at 1.5% (they were at 6.9% two years ago).
2. Twitter now accounts for 2.9% of all traffic to kottke.org while Facebook is 0.9%. That's understandable considering I invest a lot of time on Twitter and almost none on Facebook. For reference, StumbleUpon is at 6.5% and incoming Google search traffic is 25.5%.
Tags: kottke.org
New Bookmark
mdirolf’s DjanMon at master – GitHub – "Demo showing how to use MongoDB with PyMongo from a Django project"
Unlucky Monkey
“Willfully perverse” was the adjective that came to mind again and again throughout Unlucky Monkey. It’s about a would-be bank robber, Yamazaki, dragged through one unbelievable stroke of luck—good, bad, and horrible—after another. By the end of the film he’s an empty husk, limping into oncoming traffic for speedy deliverance from any further indignity. I suspect most of the people watching would want to hurl themselves in after him.
Me, I was divided. On the one hand, Monkey was put together with consummate skill: it looks great, the acting is solid, and the director—Sabu, of Dangan Runner and Postman Blues, et al.—has a great sense of the absurd. On the other hand, there’s literally nothing else but absurdity at work here. It’s a lot like Scorsese’s underrated After Hours in both tone and logic (or lack of same), but that film had a curious kind of heart and soul to it, and this one just seems to find various ways to repeat the same few basic ideas until most everyone is dead.
A botched bank robbery, a trio of bumbling gangsters, a bag of money:
all normally thriller ingredients, but here given a tragic/existential twist.No question that the first act or so is brilliant. Yamazaki (Shinichi Tsutsumi) and another cohort discover to their astonishment that the bank they were going to stick up has already been robbed by someone else. Through an insane chain of coincidences, Yamazaki ends up running for his life with the loot in his hands, then rounds a corner and accidentally stabs a woman in the stomach. Now he’s quite literally got blood on his hands. Guilt-ridden and panicky, he buries the money in a tract of land near Tokyo’s harbor and tries to either conquer his guilt or expunge it. Neither works.
All this is paralleled with another plotline about three bumbling gangsters who mistakenly kill a rival gang boss, bury him, and then try vainly to deal with the fallout. The two plotlines eventually intersect in a way that isn’t so much fated or even farcical as just plain forced, and by the time we get to the final shots (which are eerie and plaintive, I admit) everything’s canceled itself out. I suspect that was the point, but that’s exactly the problem: by the time we realize what the full scope of the movie’s idea is, we also realize the director thinks it’s a lot more interesting than we do.
Despite being great-looking, Unlucky Monkey is more
of a filmed idea than an actual movie.Here and there, the movie has moments. There’s a hilarious bit where Yamazaki evades the police (he thinks) by hiding out in a community meeting where he becomes an unexpected rabble-rouser. I half-expected those people to be his new lease on life, but nothing comes of it. A bit where the gangsters get trapped in a men’s room while an assassin tries to kill them from outside—while he himself is dying from a bullet in his own gut—is riotous. And while the climax does follow from the movie’s own absurd logic and is marvelously put together to boot, I suspect it’s going to seem more satisfying to film students than anyone else. Much like everything that came before. amazon=B001EI5C5A
Two Views of Density and Driving
Are compact communities a key to fighting global warming -- or simply irrelevant?
As Lisa mentioned a few weeks back, a panel convened by the National Academy of Sciences recently concluded that compact, walkable neighborhoods can significantly reduce CO2 emissions from driving. USAToday described the findings this way:
Meeting the growing demand for conveniently located homes in neighborhoods designed to encourage walking could significantly reduce the number of miles Americans drive while giving people more housing choices, a national research panel has concluded.
If you want to fight global warming, one good way could be to live in a more compact neighborhood - with more neighbors and jobs close by, and where mass transit, biking and walking are accessible alternatives to the car.
But at about the same time, Technology Review ran an article summarizing a study that found the exact opposite: "Forget Curbing Suburban Sprawl," the headline cautioned, "Building denser cities would do little to reduce CO2 emissions."
Confused? Well, prepare to get even more confused: the Technology Review article was covering the exact same National Academy of Sciences report as USAToday and The Oregonian. Same study, but two completely opposing interpretations. What gives?
Well, the truth is that you can point to bits and pieces of the report that justify both perspectives.
USA Today and the Oregonian focus on the panel's review of the academic literature -- which shows, quite clearly, that neighborhood design exerts a powerful influence on how much driving we do. Living in a mixed-use neighborhood -- with a mixture of single family homes and multi-family housing, with some stores, transit, and other services nearby -- might cut the average person's driving by perhaps a third to a half, compared with car-dependent sprawl. Living in an even more compact urban neighborhood, with lots of stores and jobs within walking distance, might cut per capita driving by a half to two-thirds, or perhaps more.
At the level of an entire metropolis, the effects of compact design can be signficant. The report found that Portland's metropolitan land use and transportation planning system, in place since the 1970s, has cut city residents' driving by 17 percent. Just so, residents of the comparatively compact Boston metro area drive a quarter less than do folks in sprawling Atlanta.
And yet the study also notes that land use can't change overnight. It's long, slow work to turn a place like Atlanta into a place like Boston. And Portland's success in reining in sprawl has been hard earned -- and even then, the reduction in gasoline use in Portland is comparable to what would be achieved by lifting average vehicle gas mileage from 20 mpg to 23 mpg.
That's where the Technology Review's gets its pessimism. At least one panel member went on record saying that changing land use policies was too slow, too difficult, and requires too much intergovernmental coordination, to do much to rein in greenhouse gases.
As I see it, there are at least 5 major reasons why we shouldn't settle for the more pessimistic view.
1) We should think on the margins: A metro area's population might grow only a percent or two a year, so the averages don't budge much year-to-year. But on the margins, encouraging new development in denser areas turns out to be a very effective way of reducing the greenhouse gas emissions from new residents. Over the long haul, it's the margins that matter, since they control the direction of change.
2) There's more to emissions than how much we drive: Reductions in driving understate the climate benefits of compact neighborhoods. As this study shows, living in a compact neighborhood doesn't just reduce how many miles you drive, it also seems to increase the odds that you'll choose a more fuel efficient car. And compact neighborhoods can also reduce net emissions for heating, cooling, and powering your home.
3) Creating alternatives to sprawl has multiple benefits. Channeling growth into compact neighborhoods can help protect farmland and open space; reduce wasteful spending on public infrastructure; promote health; reduce impervious surface per capita; and so forth. As important as greenhouse gases are, it's only one reason among many for curbing sprawl.
4) Waiting for the feds is a sucker's game. Cities and towns that want to take action to protect the climate simply can't sit back and wait for federal action on, say, boosting auto fuel efficiency. Waiting for the feds is the lazy way out -- and given the ever-changing nature of politics, it's an incredibly risky strategy, since even the most progressive federal policies can change overnight.
5) Over the long haul, even small things matter--a lot. Global warming is a long-term problem, and it requires long-term solutions. Sure, it could take 50 years or more for changes in urban form to take a major bite out of US emissions. But if the developed world is going to make the massive emissions cuts that are going to be necessary, we're going to have to employ every single tool at our disposal.
In the end, then, I see the fatalistic view of land use -- essentially, that changing land use is just too much hard -- as not merely unhelpful, but unethical. Rather than bemoan how hard it is to make progress, I'd rather buckle down and get to work.This article originally appeared on Sightline Daily
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(Posted by Clark Williams-Derry in Urban Design and Planning at 11:29 AM)
Show Me the Code: NYT Trender
This is the first in a series of posts featuring demo applications that will help you learn how to use Times APIs. We'll look at NYT Trender, which showcases the Times Article Search API.
Making BLTs from scratch
Michael Ruhlman announces the winners of his BLT From Scratch contest.
From scratch means: You grow your tomato, you grow your lettuce, you cure your own bacon or pancetta, you bake your own bread (wild yeast preferred and gets higher marks but is not required), you make your own mayo. All other embellishments, creative interpretations of the BLT welcome.
Don't miss the winner's BLT flow chart; he made his own sea salt from sea water.
Tags: food Michael Ruhlman
Try Coding Dear Boy
Several times a week I get an emails like, “Can you explain how Flickr does XYZ? I’m hoping there is a nice packaged solution for this.”
XYZ can be anything from “draw tag maps”, to “click in place editing”, to “scale MySQL”.
And I’m always a little baffled as to what to respond.
Until I realized what was going on.
Laziness Impatience Hubris
This is the dark side of the geek virtue of laziness.
The belief that if one just thinks hard enough, or cleverly enough, that problems will have an “elegant solution”. And by “elegant” we mean a solution that doesn’t involve much code. (elegant, such a tricky word, it can also mean writing tons of code for problems that will likely never manifest) And by “think hard and clever”, a good short cut is probably just be to ask someone.
So I’ve come up with a response that looks something like:
“We generally try do the dumbest thing that will work first. And that’s usually as far as we get. Almost everything we do is pretty straightforward, and as such is well documented around the Web, sometimes by us, generally by others. And when we do get fiendishly clever, as we do now and again, it’s usually a highly tuned (read idiosyncratic) solution for the problems we’re trying to solve.”Method Acting
But what I want to say, in the spirit of the great Laurence Olivier on giving advice to Dustin Hoffman, “My dear boy, why don’t you try coding?”.
Duct Tape
Which is not to say I mind getting these questions, I love talking about this stuff, it’s why I do it. And it’s often amusing to give the, “This is how we do it at Flickr, no really” talk.
But at the end of the day its 0.1% compsci, 0.9% clever ideas, and 99% duct tape. (btw Joel’s The Duct Tape Programmer is a meditation in similar vein)
Library Alpha Sort In Movable Type
For a while I've been trying to figure out how to get the Movies and Books sections of this site to have alpha-sorted listings with library-style alphabetization -- in other words, so that titles starting with "A/An/The" don't get sorted on those words. I thought about creating a plugin to do this, since there's no native sort order of that variety in Movable Type, but instead I went with a template solution. It's not all that slow, and since I have these alpha indexes built in the background, it doesn't matter.
I created a template with two loop blocks:
<mt:Entries><mt:setvarblock name="mytitle">''<mt:EntryTitle
regex="s/^(A |An |The )(.*)/$2/gi" />''|
<mt:EntryID></mt:setvarblock><mt:setvar
function="push" name="myarray" value="$mytitle"/></mt:Entries><mt:loop name="myarray" sort_by="value">
<mt:setvarblock name="itemid"><mt:var name="__value__"
regex="s/''(.*)?''\|(.*)/$2/gi"></mt:setvarblock>
<mt:entries id="$itemid" limit="1">
<$mtinclude module="Entry Listing"$>
</mt:entries>
</mt:loop>The first loop block (the mt:Entries block) creates a list of all the available entries for the category in question, transforms them with a regex so that the name has "A/An/The" stripped out, combines the name with its entry ID in a consistent way that's easy for a regex to re-extract, and builds an array out of them. The elements in the array look like this:
''28 Days Later''|2187
''A Time To Live And A Time To Die''|2402(etc.)
The second loop takes the array, sorts it, extracts the ID number for the entry, and uses that to generate all the relevant information about the entry (its real name, for instance). The Entry Listing module is an include I used to display the entry name and some additional data (e.g., whether or not there's video on the web available for it).
I was originally going to use a hashtable instead of an array, but this turned out to be easier for me to wrap my head around at this stage of the game.
NOTE: In the above code examples I've inserted linebreaks for readability. I strongly recommend stripping those out before using this in a production environment.
Google Docs Adds LaTeX Support
A great day for scientists on the internet!
Google Docs, the online "office" suite of tools, has added a full equation editor into the document editor. Not only can you point-and-click your way through building equations, you can write them out if you're fluent in LaTeX and adjust them via an automatic preview.
As for LaTeX around these parts, I previously authored a MovableType plugin to output images from LaTeX code which has languished as I've been away from school. Now that I'm back in school (more on this later), more and more LaTeX will be required so I'll have to bring the plugin back from the dead. Hopefully soon!
[ http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/09/back-to-school-with-google-docs.html ]
"Homeless" American Girl Doll Costs $95 [Crass]
Shared by Eve
i am completely obsessed with this story
Looking for the perfect gift for the little girl who has everything, from her own pet llama to dramatic ski and swim vacations? If the little girl happens to be Chrissa, a character in the American Girl doll series, a homeless friend may just be the perfect accessory. And if you're a real little girl, wouldn't you just love a homeless friend, too? Or, better yet, a homeless friend doll, for a mere $95?
Gwen, a limited-edition doll, is part of the backstory for Chrissa (what, you didn't know dolls had backstories?), who proves her worth by standing up for her "different" friends, including homeless Gwen and black Sonali.
Not surprisingly, homeless advocates have objected to the doll, and question the idea that including Gwen in the product line "kind of shows awareness to what's going on in the world," as one mother shopping in an American Girl boutique told a CBS correspondent.
There are between 7,000 and 10,000 homeless children in L.A. alone ... and it's doubtful many, if any, could afford Gwen's $95 price tag.
One homeless woman in a shelter ... said Gwen touched her heart when she saw the doll in its box. The women praised the doll ... until they learned Gwen isn't a fundraising device for the homeless. "I don't even see why you would make a homeless doll, anyway," one woman said ... unless it was being used to raise money to help charities aiding the homeless.
Advocates also worry that the "valuable lessons about life," which American Girl says are taught by the dolls, include the idea that it's okay to be homeless. Tanya Tull, president of Beyond Shelter, told CBS that she's "afraid that [girls are] going to pick up the idea that it's OK, that it's an accepted segment of society that some children are homeless and some children are not."
Of course, most children will probably miss the idea that Gwen is supposed to be homeless, given that she looks pretty much identical to every other American Girl doll, down to her "white eyelet lace dress with embroidered accents." But wait! It turns out Gwen can't even afford a full lineup of accessories; she has to make do with a "pink headband that doubles as a belt." Poor Gwen!
Flap Over "Homeless" American Girl Doll [CBS]
the kindle gets poor grades at Princeton
The following is an article by Hyung Lee in yesterday's Daily Princetonian
When the University announced its Kindle e-reader pilot program last May, administrators seemed cautiously optimistic that the e-readers would both be sustainable and serve as a valuable academic tool. But less than two weeks after 50 students received the free Kindle DX e-readers, many of them said they were dissatisfied and uncomfortable with the devices.
On Wednesday, the University revealed that students in three courses -- WWS 325: Civil Society and Public Policy, WWS 555A: U.S. Policy and Diplomacy in the Middle East, and CLA 546: Religion and Magic in Ancient Rome -- were given a new Kindle DX containing their course readings for the semester. The University had announced last May it was partnering with Amazon.com, founded by Jeff Bezos '86, to provide students and faculty members with the e-readers as part of a sustainability initiative to conserve paper.
But though they acknowledged some benefits of the new technology, many students and faculty in the three courses said they found the Kindles disappointing and difficult to use.
"I hate to sound like a Luddite, but this technology is a poor excuse of an academic tool," said Aaron Horvath '10, a student in Civil Society and Public Policy. "It's clunky, slow and a real pain to operate."
Horvath said that using the Kindle has required completely changing the way he completes his coursework.
"Much of my learning comes from a physical interaction with the text: bookmarks, highlights, page-tearing, sticky notes and other marks representing the importance of certain passages -- not to mention margin notes, where most of my paper ideas come from and interaction with the material occurs," he explained. "All these things have been lost, and if not lost they're too slow to keep up with my thinking, and the 'features' have been rendered useless."
Wilson School professor Stan Katz, who teaches Horvath's class, said he is interested in whether he "can teach as effectively in using this as in using books and E-Reserve material and in whether students can use this effectively," adding that "the only way to find out is to try it."
One of Katz' main concerns is whether students can do close reading of the texts with the new device, he said.
"I require a very close reading of texts. I encourage students to mark up texts, and ... I expect them to underline and to highlight texts," Katz explained. "The question is whether you can do them as effectively with a Kindle as with paper."
Katz added that had to confront the issue early when he transitioned from using familiar texts for teaching.
"I have all of my books marked up," Katz said. "Either I use my own annotations, or I take the time, an immense amount of time" to annotate with the Kindle.
Katz also said he has little incentive to move his annotations to the Kindle, explaining that he heard the University won't use the Kindle next year and adding that he finds the device "hard to use."
Katz also added that the absence of page numbers in the Kindle makes it more difficult for students to cite sources consistently.
"The Kindle doesn't give you page numbers; it gives you location numbers. They have to do that because the material is reformatted," Katz said. He noted that while the location numbers are "convenient for reading," they are "meaningless for anyone working from analog books."
Though using a Kindle is voluntary, no one has opted out of using a Kindle in Katz' class, so he has permitted his students to use location numbers in their written work for the course.
Should students from any of the courses choose to not take part in the pilot program -- called "Toward Print-Less and Paper-Less Courses: Pilot Amazon Kindle Program" -- they will be allowed to print their readings.
While the Kindle may hinder the reading experience of some, others may benefit from the device's unique electronic display.
Classics professor Harriet Flower, who teaches Religion and Magic in Ancient Rome, said in an e-mail that the Kindle "is very easy on the eye," adding that she could "read for longer without [her] eyes feeling tired."
But Rachel George '10, a student in Katz' class, said in an e-mail that she has found it "a little difficult to adjust to the e-reader."
"A huge benefit to the Kindle is having large quantities of reading available at your fingertips and not having to print and lug around books and articles," she said. "Some disadvantages are the necessity to charge the Kindle and the impossibility of 'flipping through' a book."
George also said the annotation software was "useful but not as easy or 'organic' feeling as taking notes on paper."
"For some people," she explained, "electronic reading can never replace the functionality and 'feel' of reading off paper."
Scott Stevenson Is Writing a Cocoa Book for O’Reilly
I’m looking forward to this one. Sounds like he’s given a lot of thought to one of the toughest problems facing anyone writing a Cocoa book: how much C do you assume the reader knows?
I decided to teach a core set of C concepts that apply directly to Mac and iPhone programming, leaving out the archaic C conventions that Cocoa has better answers for. So this book has only two chapters on C. They focus on just the parts that you need to be a productive Cocoa programmer.
There’s already a web site dedicated to the book, and it’s available as an O’Reilly “Rough Cut”.
David Byrne's Bicycle Diaries Talk
A bike romantic, David Byrne talked about his travels with the bike and how unfriendly most American cities are to cyclists. He was on the Seattle stop of a tour for his new book: the Bicycle Diaries. Unlike the usual book tour, David focused the event on advocacy with a civic leader, an urban theorist, a bicycle advocate, and himself each giving 10 minute presentations.
After the talks, the audience interacted with questions whilein the hallways of the venue various agencies were represented for bike-related conversations and there were more bike-related books for sale.
Each attendee received a book with their admission and most were reading it while we waited for the talks.
David’s charisma on stage was that of a cyclist sharing trip photos, instead of a rockstar with a new record out. He didn’t give any media interviews and his PR agency didn’t advance any books. The emphasis was on the bike and the community of cyclists in each city.
He began his talk by observing that our urban spaces are designed for cars and not people. Riding around the world and then back in the US, he photographs lots of concrete and not a lot of people interacting in the cities of cars. His aerial photo of Seattle showed that faithful decision to run a highway through the middle of it (audience groaned).
David’s presentation was an eloquent reminder of why we travel with bikes wherever we go, with Mobile Socials in Vegas and blogging from international destinations. The bike is a connector. It’s made our lives richer by all the interesting people we’ve met and things we’ve seen.
David made a point to mention that he bikes in plain clothes and not for racing or even as a tourist. He just rides his bike for the romance of it.
So do we.
More David Byrne
David talks next in San Francisco, Portland, then Ottowa and Toronto. His book is on sale now and getting very positive press.
- David Byrne: Cities, Bicycles, and the Future of Getting Around
- David Byrne: Plain Clothes Cycling
- Bicycle Diaries Book Tour
- Cycling as a Remedy
- David Byrne: A Guided Tour
- Once in a Lifetime Encounter in Austin
More bike travel
Mark is currently traveling with other cyclists in Taiwan and next month we’re riding urban in Europe and India. We’re saving our read of the Bicycle Diaries for the long plane rides. This paragraph from David’s introduction resonated
These diaries go back at least a dozen years. Many were written during work-related visits to various towns—for a performance or an exhibit, in my case. Lots of folks have jobs that take them all over the world. I found that biking around for just a few hours a day—or even just to and from work—helps keep me sane. People can lose their bearings when they travel, unmoored from their familiar physical surroundings, and that somehow loosens some psychic connections as well. Sometimes that’s a good thing—it can open the mind, offer new insights— but frequently it’s also traumatic in a not-so-good way. Some people retreat into themselves or their hotel rooms if a place is unfamiliar, or lash out in an attempt to gain some control. I myself find that the physical sensation of self-powered transport coupled with the feeling of self-control endemic to this two wheeled situation is nicely empowering and reassuring, even if temporary, and it is enough to center me for the rest of the day.
The last plane read was Joe Parkin’s A Dog in a Hat.
We recieved a media pass to the event and thank you Town Hall Seattle.
Beyonce Needs a Giant Sequined Cummerbund That Says “G.M.O.S.”
Rap Radar points us to this youtube clip of Beyonce performing “Crazy In Love” at a recent concert in Singapore. It’s amazing to watch someone so on top of her game. Her relationship with the song—which is already a generation-defining standard—and her horns, and her drums, and her guitarist, and her back-up singers and dancers, and the lighting, and the wind-machine and the audience: she has every element on lock.
This isn’t really fair to do to anyone, but let’s compare Beyonce’s mastery of her form to that of the all-time champ (who she references herself in the mid-song horn break). Here’s the Godfather Of Soul, James Brown, doing his own type of crazy (not karate) on a Midnight Special show in 1974.
ArtCrank opens Thursday
ArtCrank Portland! A poster party for bicycle people!ArtCrankPortland is set for Thursday, Oct 1 at the ACE Hotel. This will be opening night for the Oregon Manifest Bike Expo. Admission is free, and all posters are $30.
Also note that $5 from the sale of each poster will be donated to Bikes to Rwanda.
Smart structures
There are some architects who theorize that intuitive, adaptable buildings are in our future. These structures might be made of components that adjust to certain variables: a particularly rainy evening, a raucous Super Bowl party on the third floor, or a brutally cold December day. Says German architect Axel Ritter:
Buildings of the future will be able to change colour, size, shape and opacity in reaction to stimuli. Architects will be able to design buildings that change their geometry according to the weight of the people inside.The use of these reactive materials would alter the relationship between architecture and building behavior. If you're lucky, it might also improve your apartment's laughable square footage.
Tags: architecture smart materials
My Talk Today About The NYC Startup Sector
A couple things:
1) It will be live on ustream at http://www.ustream.tv/channel/clickable
2) The talk is scheduled to start at 6:30pm. I'll twitter out the URL when the talk is about to start.
I want to thank everyone who gave me feedback in the comments. It is a great discussion, comment thread so far. The final deck, reflecting some of the comments is below.
I'm looking forward to giving this talk and if it is well received, I'll do it again soon in a larger venue.
In Class With Zo! (Vol. 2 - The Roots Version, 6th Period) - 09.25.09
I favorited a YouTube video: My 6th period class of students has obviously been brought up on some good music. Earlier in the week, they requested to learn "Break You Off" by The Roots... Request granted. A couple of them JUST started playing an instrument when school started at the end of August. Regardless, we practiced it as a class and I decided to hit the 'record' button on them to capture the results... Raymond McCrary - Drums Keith Preacher - Strings Akeil Edwards - Keys Lamont Harris - Bass
September 28, 2009
openstreetmap genuine advantage
It should be obvious by now that I've got OpenStreetMap on the brain, and I'm not alone (though I hope I'm able to out-dork Flickr here).
Since we were involved in last month's DataSF launch, I've been thinking a bit about how an anarcho-syndicalist geo data project becomes useful to a city like San Francisco. Right now, we have two broad sets of free-enough SF streets data: the city's own shapefiles and OSM's excellent coverage. There's been a bit of effort expended on moving from the latter to the former; the OSM data itself is largely based on a mass import of the TIGER/Line set. What about movements from OSM to SF, and continued cross feeds between the two? At the launch party with the mayor, I asked whether the city had a plan in place to handle feedback and corrections on its data, which I think is absolutely critical for a mature data curation practice. Right now, I suspect that the DataSF centerlines file contains a large number of paper streets and a few long-since-demolished freeway overpasses.
A technical answer to this issue would address the need for a city to vouch for what it knows and verify changes made by others, as well as preserve the flexibility needed by editors of OpenStreetMap. Public key cryptography, the Right Answer No One Likes, has a feature called signing, where it's possible for the holder of a key to add a forgery-proof signature to a block of data. I've put together a small project called GOSM (Genuine OpenStreetMap) that automates the process of adding signatures to ways in the OSM database and stashing them in tags.
There are a few needs here that are worth thinking about.
First, it's likely that there are multiple overlapping constituencies for any given bit of geography: the city, the county, the state, neighborhood groups, commercial interests, etc. It should be possible for any or all of these groups to offer independent signatures on bits of geography that concern them.
Second, it's important to sign only the aspects of the geography that matter, and to do so in a way that's resistant to noisy changes. For example, a signature on a road that vouches for its name and classification should not be invalidated by the addition of a bike lane tag.
Third, it should be possible for the signing authority to publish a list of their own contributions for comparison or verification.
How do these come into play in GOSM? Using it is very simple, from the command line. Here we sign the highway, name, and oneway tags on two streets:
python sign.py -u (osm username) -p (osm password) -k (gpg key) -t highway,name,oneway 28518589 23969004 > out.txtThe signature is added to each way as a tag, called gosm:sig:8CBDE645 (that last bit is the key ID - there might be more than one). The value is a string that includes the requested tag names ("highway", etc.), a base64-encoded GPG signature, and a date+time. The signed message is not stored, but it's an encoding of the tag values and the geographic location of each node in the way that's easily derivable from the way itself. I use Bencode for the encoding because each value has one and only one possible encoding, and Geohash for the locations because Bencode doesn't like floating point numbers.
The important bit is that there can be many signatures on a way, one for each interested signing authority. I've signed a few streets I know, and a city could do the same with a good key.
Checking a signature is easy:
python verify.py -k 8CBDE645 28518589 23969004How many people actually need to verify a signature? Probably not many; public key crypto is sort of a mathematician's backup to common sense. What happens when signatures are invalidated by later edits? I expect that a bit of common sense would apply here as well, with consumers of the data using investigation and judgement to decide whom to trust, and signing authorities keeping an eye on signatures. The outcome I think would be especially worthwhile would be if a city or county used a mechanism like this to determine when its own database fell out of date, and treated the new conflicting information as input rather than contradiction, signing subsequent versions of streets as OSM participants mark them with updates.
The Fanfarlo Four Step…
…a tasty little jig to grow your fanbase.
We recently had the pleasure of working with an incredibly talented, hard-working band and management team, the Fanfarlo crew. Their campaign makes for an interesting study as it highlights a focus on growth as opposed to revenue. We’ll get into the details momentarily, but the basic formula they applied is one that can benefit growth bands far and wide:
1) Don’t suck.
2) Get others to introduce you to their audiences.
3) Make those audiences an offer they can’t refuse.
4) Repeat.Now for a little background and detail…
After obtaining some groundswell in the UK, Fanfarlo certainly struck the right chord with independent music enthusiasts with stellar performances at CMJ and SXSW in 2008/2009, including a secret garden performance and an off-the-cuff recovery (electrical failures) that endeared them to those in attendance. One doesn’t have to scour the blogs long before they see a pattern of praises being sung for this quintet.
The band released their debut album, Reservoir, through iTunes in March, 2009. Check it out for yourself on the widget below (copied/embedded from Fanfarlo.com). It’s a keeper.
The band sold 839 albums through the US iTunes store after 3 months of being live. Like many other successful independent bands, the crew entertained label offers but hadn’t found anything of much interest. They then decided to ignite their album release through a direct-to-fan campaign.What was that campaign to entail? We started by asking management what they really wanted out of it. The goal was articulated as such: “I want to play the Mercury Lounge in NY and have a queue around the corner“…selling out a popular venue in a major US market. Management’s clear focus let us, in turn, focus on fan growth as our primary measure of success, and from there, the plan was crafted.
I present you the Fanfarlo Four Step:
1) Don’t suck.
It all begins with a quality product. This growth strategy is not for untested music or those just finding their voice. We can argue about what’s good music and what’s not, but at the end of the day, your music has to excite and enthuse folks to the point they feel the need to share it with others. Do some googling and see how folks are talking about Fanfarlo. Are fans and taste makers in your niche reflecting similar sentiment? If not, maybe there’s some product issues to deal with or perhaps you’re playing to the wrong audience.2) Get others to introduce you to their audience.
Let’s face it…as a small band, your direct reach will only go so far. You’ve got to enlist the help of others to meet new fans. Fanfarlo did this in three primary ways:
- Assembled a team of marketing professionals: in addition to Topspin, Fanfarlo brought on the folks from Radar Maker, Sneak Attack, and 12th Degree for publicity and online marketing in the UK and US. These folks worked diligently to get Fanfarlo’s online presence aligned with campaign objectives, find the right tastemakers and media outlets for new Fanfarlo fans, and turn them on to the opportunity at hand (Fanfarlo’s offer discussed in point #3).
- Enlisted the help of a major music act that had strong ties to the band and wholeheartedly endorsed their music. This act introduced Fanfarlo to their fans by way of email.
- Made it dead simple and natural for anyone to share the offer with their own audience, be that 25 followers on twitter, 200 friends on Facebook, or 1,500 unique visitors on a blog. This was accomplished through Topspin widgets that not only make sharing and embedding a snap, but they also provide a direct-link/call-to-action that leads back to the artist-controlled offer page (a seemingly simple, but very important detail). This last item is a bit of a multiplier. It made sure that attention garnered by the marketing team, band introduction, or general buzz could in turn generate more attention via viral sharing.
3) Make those audiences an offer they can’t refuse.
Ok, so you’ve got completely brand new fans’ attention. WTH now? It may not be the best time to hit them up to buy your $99 deluxe package that includes your baby teeth. There’s a time and place for that, but it’s not necessarily when someone’s discovering you for the first time. Fanfarlo created an offer that not only drove amazing conversion but also became a conversation piece and cause for sharing. For a limited time, they offered a full download of their album plus four bonus tracks for $1. $1 album download for 1 month. When it comes to how that offer resonated with fans, don’t take my word for it…check out a few examples for yourself – the fans do an amazing job of describing the very simple, but powerful offer with amazing accuracy:
4) Repeat.
If growth is your game, don’t stop. Remember, it’s the Fanfarlo Four Step we’re talking about here. Fanfarlo, their management, and their marketing team continue to not suck, enlist others to introduce Fanfarlo to their audiences, and make them an offer they can’t refuse. The current set of offers includes:
- Incredibly affordable tix to their US tour, which finished last week in NYC.
- A still very accessible digital download for $5.99, CD, Vinyl, and Special Edition (sorry, no baby teeth this time around). http://fanfarlo.com
Results
During June and July:
- Fanfarlo acquired 15,000 new fan relationships, 13,000 of which were paying.
- 56% (7,280) of those paying fans were from the US – representing nearly 800% growth in the US.
- 22% of all folks that saw the offer purchased. 22%! More than double what we normally see from a *stellar-performing* offer that is focused on revenue rather than growth.
- 30% of all CD/Vinyl/Special-Edition purchasers were repeat buyers – they also bought the $1 album download during the promo period.
- Reach: widgets appeared on 240 different domains and garnered 272,000 impressions and 114,000 interactions (plays, clicks, shares).
- Reach quality: 35 fans acquired per thousand impressions. Compare that to ad-based methods of promo that acquire single digit numbers of fans per thousand impressions.
- The band not only booked their NYC show, but they bumped their venue from The Mercury Lounge to The Bowery Ballroom. They also added shows in Seattle, LA, San Francisco, and Philadelphia.
- The band surfaced on The Hype Machine’s most blogged bands chart.
None too shabby team. None too shabby.PS, I’ve shared this story with a few dozen folks so far. Some that hear it like to zero in on the “major act that introduced us to their fan base” item of the story as cause for discounting the case as one that applies to other emerging artists. Understandable. That introduction certainly did play a major part in campaign sales: 30%. Even if the number was 50%, wouldn’t you consider 400% paying-fan growth in the US to be an admirable result for a month’s work?
Rather than discount the case, I encourage folks to apply some creativity to map the case to their set of circumstances…along with your other ingenuity, apply the four step. Don’t suck (at least to the people of which you’re asking endorsement – if they don’t like you, they’re not going to put their reputations on the line to recommend you). Make relationships (not hurried/impersonal solicitations for help) with artists and tastemakers with audiences of their own. Once you have that relationship, ask them, “if you like what you’re hearing, would you be willing to extend this offer to your audience?” Even if they’re not a major music act, if they make the intro, you’ve been given the opportunity to grow your audience, which brings me to the next point I want to emphasize…
…don’t discount the other executional part of the story – making those audiences an offer they can’t refuse. let them hear your music. make the value (good stuff given for great price) of your offering such that they can’t turn it down AND they feel the need to share it with their audiences. Remember, this is a strategy for growth, not revenue maximization. And of course, keep at it. Step 4 means this is something you repeat until you’re happy with the growth you’ve attained. Don’t be frustrated if your growth isn’t measured by hundreds of percentage points per campaign (I’d classify Fanfarlo’s response as amazing). Rather, listen for the feedback your audience is giving and incorporate that into your product, your offer, and the audience you choose to target.
Good luck. Join the community in the green room, and let us know what’s working for you. We love hearing lessons learned from those out there getting it done.
New Bookmark
json-framework – Project Hosting on Google Code – "…implements a strict JSON parser and generator in Objective-C."
Recreating the Adult Brownies from Andronico's
Dense. Fudgy. Butter. Coffee. Salt.
[Photographs: Tam Ngo]
Those are the words that best describe the essence of an Adult Brownie from the Bay Area-based supermarket chain Andronico's.
This brownie does not contain any alcohol, tobacco, or controlled substances, so why call it the "Adult" Brownie? Why not "Our Signature" Brownie or "Chocolate Fudge" Brownie? One bite and you will understand the name. This brownie is not for the amateur brownie eater, not for the faint of heart, and certainly not for children. This thing is so sinfully decadent it stops just short of needing to be sold in a plain brown wrapper.
— From the Adult Brownie website
It's been years since I snarfed down five of them (hoarded from my last trip west) but I can still almost taste the crust mixed with my drool. Recreating the brownie for East Coast consumption has been my obsession for some time now. Most recipes yield a fluffy or crumbly brownie, but nothing like the chocolate-studded lead weight of the Adult Brownie.
I've managed to come up with a satisfying facsimile tweaking the bejesus out of a Scharffen Berger recipe. The keys to my success: coffee, salt, and letting the brownies "stale." It is during this resting period that the brownies collapse, becoming less mousse-like and more brick-like. The butter, coffee, and salt notes come to the fore as the treacly impact of the sugar recedes. Keeping flour to a minimum creates brownies that are chewy, crispy on the edges, and delightful crackly in crust. The longer you wait to eat these, the more compact they become.
Adult Brownies
(or Butter-Brick Brownies with Coffee and Salt)
- makes sixteen 2-inch brownies -
Ingredients
12 tablespoons (1 1/2 stick or 6 ounces) unsalted butter, cut into cubes
8 ounces Valrhona Lacté (41% cocoa) / milk chocolate, coarsely chopped
8 ounces Valrhona Grand Cru Noir Manjari (64% cocoa) / dark milk chocolate, coarsely chopped1 1/2 cup granulated sugar
4 large eggs, room temperature
2 tablespoons vanilla1/2 cup all-purpose flour, sifted
1 teaspoon fleur de sel or sea salt
1 tablespoon instant coffee powder3 ounces dark chocolate, cut into large chunks (optional)
Softened butter, cocoa powder for dusting pan
Procedure
1. Position a baking rack in the lower third of the oven and preheat to 325°F. Cut a piece of parchment with handles for an 8" x 8" x 2" anodized pan. Butter the top side of the parchment and dust with cocoa powder.
2. Create a double boiler on very low heat: in a large metal bowl overlapping a small pot of gently simmering water, place the chocolate and cubed butter. Stir occasionally until just melted. Remove from heat and stir until smooth.
3. After the chocolate mixture has cooled to touch, use a large rubber spatula or wooden spoon and beat sugar and vanilla into the chocolate mixture. Next, beat in the eggs, one at a time.
4. Add the flour, salt, and coffee and mix vigorously by hand for 5 minutes. At this point, the batter will be glossy and pull away from the sides of the bowl.
5. If you prefer your brownies extra chunky, gently fold chocolate chunks into the batter.
6. Pour the mixture into the prepared pan and tap the pan on a counter top to even out the batter. Bake for 22 minutes, take out the pan, and tap the pan on the counter twice to further even out and condense the batter. Rotate and reinsert the pan to bake for another 22 minutes (or until a skewer inserted in the center comes out moist but free of uncooked batter).
7. Remove the pan from the oven and place on a cooling rack for 10 minutes. Remove the brownies from the pan using the parchment handles and place the brownies on the rack. Cool completely before cutting.
Notes
Flour: A 1/2 cup of flour yields a fluffier brownie. Reducing the recipe to a 1/4 cup of flour results in a more compressed brownie that tastes slightly more bitter of dark chocolate. The brownies will also seem oilier coming out of the oven but the oil is reabsorbed by the brownie the longer it's allowed to rest.
Chocolate: Use the best you can get your paws on. Valrhona's great for its nice balance of the creamy and bitter—its flavors bloom in the mouth in a languid, pleasing way. El Rey is also a fine substitute for its fruitier notes. Callebaut is good and though bland, it has great mouthfeel. (Unfortunately, the taste of Scharffen Berger chocolate is strangely wooden and flat.)
Eggs: Using large eggs results in a denser brownie, while extra large eggs yield a puffier, fluffier brownie.
Mixing method: To create a crackly, durable brownie top, it is important to put aside the electric beater and mix the batter by hand. (I especially enjoy the contrast between my brownie-gut and my brownie-buff arms after this upper body work-out.)
Brownie pan: Anodized pans are better for baking as they conduct and retain heat more evenly. Though non-stick, the thicker metal of the Baker's Edge maze-shaped brownie pan works well, too, if you prefer brownies with more crust.
A Steady Rain's Sex Appeal
It seems awfully early to be giving out awards for the 2009/10 Broadway season but after seeing a matinee performance of A Steady Rain on Saturday, I have an award I'd like to give out before the Spring Tony-rush. And the winner for Best Ass on Broadway is... a tie between Daniel Craig and Hugh Jackman, the show's two blockbuster-quality stars. How can one really choose between Craig in gray, high-waisted suitpants with suspenders and Jackman in a classic workman's khaki? They're two completely different tastes. I realize that this is not a nationally recognized nor legitimate award but sometimes shows come along that call for a change in the rules. (The short-lived Best Performance in a Re-Created Role Award, inspired by Reba McEntire's performance in Annie Get Your Gun comes to mind.) And I believe that once more people see A Steady Rain -- set to open tomorrow Sept. 29th -- they will understand the necessity for this new award as well, although the new play about two Chicago cops is already getting a lot of attention and fan appreciation. On Saturday afternoon the two very handsome and physically fit actors got a standing ovation and were greeted by a mob of female fans gathered outside the stage door and across the street as they hopped into their waiting black SUVs. I can assure you that this is not the same scene greeting Philip Seymour Hoffman outside the NYU Skirball Center after Othello! A Steady Rain will open on Sep. 29th at Gerard Shoenfeld Theatre, 236 W. 45th St.
The Buzz of Helicopter Parents
Examiner column for September 30.
In Fairfax County, parents are not typical of most school districts. They are educated, strategic, and know their way around a computer listserv. That’s why I wasn’t surprised to discover that two Fairfax High Schools have started their own Parent Teacher Organizations instead of paying dues to the National PTA.
FCPS parents were the ones who successfully lobbied the county to change the numerical grading scale so it is more in line with others’. No more will a 93 be a B+; anything 90 or above will earn an A, just as it should have been all along, according to parents.
Parents are particularly active in good schools. Where I taught in the mid 1980s, only a few parents came to back-to-school night. They were working night shifts, students told me, or they were just too exhausted to go out after a long day’s work. Student performance mirrored that lack of involvement.
My second high school, Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, had back-to-school-nights frequented by parents, siblings, and the occasional grandparent. Rooms were so packed that standing room was scarce. “U.S. News and World Report” could rank the nation’s top schools by the percentage of parents who come to back-to-school-night, and I’m sure TJ would still come in #1.
At my final high school, Oakton, I got to know parents well because I was there 16 years. I taught multiple siblings—up to four. In one family, when child #4 was assigned a different English teacher, the parent called the counselor and said, “I think you’ve made some mistake. My children always have Dr. Jacobs!”
At the first faculty meeting of the year, there were always irony-tinged comments about parent involvement: “They are helicopters; they are watch dogs. Nothing escapes the Oakton parent. Be prepared for accountability not only to your supervisors, but to much pickier parents!” Teachers were taught to fear parental interference.
Yet my experience with parents has all been positive, since they only want schools to assure a positive learning environment. My complaints as a parent were always that a teacher or school was allowing my child to fall through the cracks. When that happened, I switched teachers or schools because of that negative treatment.
But when my children were stumbling through no fault of the system, I never complained. I only asked that someone be there to applaud when they were ready to perform. Similarly, parents never asked me to give their children more than they’d earned; they only wanted flexibility to allow that child a second chance. That’s no more than I have asked on behalf of my own children.
I applaud strong parents who have created organizations that will work for them and their children, and I suggest that teachers and administrators begin thinking of parents as allies, and not adversaries. At the end of every parent conference, a skilled teacher or counselor will turn a barrage of complaints into a moment of retooling on behalf of the student—a “changing day,” in Dr. Phil lingo. That is all a parent asks. Schools need to realize that teachers and parents are on the same side: the students’ side.
Failure-Driven Design
I use actual, measured needs to help design software. I also use reported failures to help design software. I have one more design principle: I use misunderstandings to help me design software.
In particular, this is an API-level design principle. The question changes from "How can I make a particular feature possible?" to "How can I make a particular feature impossible to misuse?"
Up-front Failure Prevention
It's easy to demonstrate failures of this principle; consider string handling in the C programming language, or global-by-default variables in Perl 5, or the Python REPL's behavior when you type
quitorexit. (That last example catches me every time I use Python's interactive mode. Thanks for the lovely warning. Please do what I want if you know what I want.)This principle also falls somewhere in between necessity-driven design and bug-driven design. It requires asking "What could possibly go wrong?", enumerating the likely and unlikely possibilities, analyzing their risk, and determining the likelihood of failure.
For example, Parrot supports a data structure known as a constant string. These are immutable singleton structures which represent strings used pervasively throughout the core system. By making them immutable, we obviate the need to make copies to prevent unwanted modifications. By making them singletons, we can collapse multiple references to a single string into pointers to that singleton string and save lots of memory.
We use a macro called
CONST_STRINGin C code in the Parrot core to identify one of these strings.While it would be nice if our documentation were always sufficient to describe how to write a Parrot extension without copying and pasting code from the core, I realize that almost everyone who will ever write a Parrot extension will start with skeleton code cribbed from elsewhere.
I wanted to make the constant string technique work reasonably well for extensions as well. It'll never be quite as fast nor efficient as the core version, but a quick cache does help a lot of benchmarks.
Our first attempt used a different macro,
CONST_STRING_GEN, as the internal implementation of that macro had to be different. Rather than poking directly into interpreter memory, extensions have to go through a secondary lookup: they don't have access to internals in the same way that Parrot's core does.Then I realized the problem.
I don't want to explain the mechanics of how constants string work, at least not to people writing extensions. I want to say nothing more than "If you know you'll never need to modify this string, mark it as a constant string." I know I don't want to explain the differences between the caching models, especially because extensions shouldn't need to know anything about Parrot's unencapsulated internals.
Yet I knew that people would copy code from the core into their extensions and then wonder why their versions Just Did Not Work.
I changed the extension processor to emit a different version of the
CONST_STRINGmacro local to each extension which uses the appropriate public API to manipulate constant singleton strings. Even though the mechanics of how this works differs between core code and extension code, it still reads the same way. People can copy and paste code between core data structures and extensions without knowing the difference, at least in this respect.Even though copying and pasting is generally bad, it's so pervasive (especially in this context), our interfaces have to allow for it -- and should not allow people to make subtle errors.
For further reading, I suggest Joshua Bloch's How to design a good API and why it matters talk from OOPLSA 2006.
Reacting to Failure
Of course, it's not always possible to predict what people will do wrong.
Sometimes the best you can do is look at a bug report, ask yourself "Wait, why in the world would you ever write code this way?", and then work backwards. How did that failure occur? Do you not provide the right APIs? Do your abstractions leak? Are people working around a broken feature? Are people working around the lack of a feature?
Sometimes you need to pave the cowpaths. Sometimes you need to change the way you explain code. Sometimes you need to change the name of an API call or a parameter to suggest the right behavior.
Mostly you need to understand where and why expectations went wrong. Only then can you change the vocabulary of the system to change expectations for the better.
That's why I welcome quick, rapid feedback. If something doesn't work, I want to know that as soon as possible -- before it gets too established to improve, before it confuses too many people, and before people accept it as "just another quirk."
There can be a little pain to start, especially for early adopters, but there's no substitute for solving real problems in the real world to help you understand exactly what you should have designed in the first place. Maybe next time you'll get more right.
(This, I believe, is one of those practices which separates real, actual agile development from Big-A-Because-It's-Hip-Agile development: pervasive, ubiquitous feedback gathered and reflected upon to produce small, verifiable changes to development practices designed to improve the process itself.)
A newt that slices and dices
The Spanish ribbed newt has an interesting method of dealing with perceived threats. The creature activates its ribcage like mini switchblades, forcing them through its own skin. Even more remarkable, the newt's highly adapted immune system and collagen-cased bones allow it to heal quickly and without risk of infection, which makes it one job interview away from a position with the X-Men.
Tags: nature science weapons
The New Bourdain: After filming an episode of No...
After filming an episode of No Reservations at the mansion that inspired the setting of The Shining, Michael Ruhlman reflects on how his buddy Bourdain has evolved over the years: "He was munching pain killers like breath mints and began to obsess about his cuticles...It's not just his kid he talks about now, it's his kitty cat as well. Was his fame making him go all Michael Jackson on me?" [Ruhlman via Eater SF]
The Footnotes of Mad Men: Suburban Rococo
Oh, no! The world is tugging away at Don Draper’s individuality one thread at a time! First it started with the sexy maypole teacher pointing out that Don’s nihilistic quest for self-indulgence is no different from all the other ‘bored’ Ossissingite daddies—he’s even donning the same shirt as them! Then Roger characterizes Don’s personal brand as someone else’s (The Ogs). Some barbituated crazed kids think of him as just another spook (the nerve of those wayward hippies!). And Don’s own hearth, the place where he puts up his feet and thinks about the majestic Mohawk nation, has been invaded by a home designer who undoubtedly has put the same ‘modern Chinoiserie‘ design into the homes of hundreds of other stylish couples. I guess none of us can be too different, huh? We’re all muscle and blood after all.
§ Throwing open her arms, the matronly designer introduces Don to his new living room. A kind of suburban rococo design with Eastern flourishes. The first piece: a ‘Chinoiserie breakfront.’ Chinoiserie is just a fancy French way of saying “sort of Asian.” Chinoiserie became all the rage in 18th century France when Louis XIV decorated Versiailles with new andmost fanciful European interpretations of Chinese styles. It had a resurgence in 20th century design.
Next to the breakfront, is a ‘Japanese influenced Dunbar couch.’ The low slung, brass footed loveseat is a fixture of mid-century design but the Japanese twist is a direct toss to Bert Cooper’s Japonisme-themed office . (WHO MAKES UP THESE DESIGN TERMS?!) Japonisme is, yes, a French term that translates into Japanism. There was a heightened interest in Japanese graphic arts, textiles and fashion at the turn of the century (similar to the Western love affair with Art Nouveau).
According to the Met, early woodcut prints that made their way west showed that “simple, transitory, everyday subjects from ‘the floating world’ could be presented in appealingly decorative ways.” Hmm. So then we take it that both Roger and Bert seeped their way into the Draper home this week!
§ Then, of course, there was much discussion of Footnotes’ favorite, David Ogilvy. The Ogs’ 1963 book ‘Confessions of an Ad Man’ is like a compendium of very clever bumper stickers about how to be a smart, classy man in advertising and in general. It reads like magazine writing; punchy and easily digestible. For instance:
H.L. Mencken once said that nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public. That is not true. I have come to believe that it pays to make all your layouts project a feeling of good taste, provided that you do it unobtrusively. An ugly layout suggests an ugly product. There are very few products which do not benefit from being given a first-class ticket through life.
Ogilvy’s books are core curriculum in ad school, so understandably some modern young ad men tend to sneer at the Ogs philosophy. I asked Awl-pal and young(ish) advertising guru, Mark the Copyranter about his relationship with Ogs:
NVC: How am I supposed to feel about Ogilvy’s eyepatch ad? I’M CONFLICTED.
MC: Ah, the very successful Hathaway man, campaign, of course. But stupid, nonetheless. I read ‘Ogilvy On Advertising’… a long time ago. Didn’t much care for his theories because I was a YOUNG AD REBEL
NVC: When you rebel against Ogilvy what are you rebelling against?
MC: British stuffiness, copy-heavy logical ads. The visual is the hero, baby! Any good madman believes this and was taught this in ad school… It’s better to dramatically visualize a product’s benefit, than say it. Because, then you can exaggerate (LIE) without as much rebuke. Plus, it looks cooler in one’s portfolio.Ah, could you imagine what Don’s flash portfolio would look like? (With a Tumblr attached!) Wish I had a fainting couch to swoon on.
§ Speaking of sumptuous items that would only lead to our panties tangled about the ankles, what do you think Peggy’s Hermes scarf looked like!? Well it could have been Jackie O’s Hermes zodiac-themed kind, or this perfectly girly number adorned with pink butterflies. Or how about this purple scarf patterned with DUCKS! Wonder how many other girls were wrapped in such “elegance and success”?
So how hard to stand out nowadays.
So very much more can be found at The Footnotes of Mad Men.
David Attenborough's favorite animals
I can't get this to work (because I'm in the US?) but the BBC has put up a collection of David Attenborough's favorite moments from his last 30 years of shooting nature documentary videos. More info here.
It has always been my hope that through filmmaking I can bring the wonder of the natural world into people's sitting rooms, inspire people to find out more and to care about the world we share.
(via @dunstan)
Tags: David Attenborough video
rickwebb: spiers: rickwebb: spiers: ninety9: While everyone is dusting off their Free Polanski...
While everyone is dusting off their Free Polanski rant (kids — he’s the ‘auteur’ who thinks 13-year old girls hopped up — down? — on ‘ludes is sexy backdoor time action), can someone give me the definitive “No, really it wasn’t rape, but here is why sex with a 13-year old you just fed fucking drugs to is okay” argument? Cause I’m curious how that one is sold. And then heading right to the nearest grade school playground. Kidding! Maybe!Well, the excuse for a certain WaPo columnist is But My Husband Is a Polish Official Who’s Lobbying on Polanski’s Behalf So It Must Be Okay.
There are two popular lines of logic here that people usually use: The first is the “Polanski suffered enough” argument - that he is a holocaust survivor and had quite recently survived his wife after the Manson Helter-Skelter murders, and the dude just didn’t have his head on straight. The second, and in my mind far more compelling case, is that the victim wants it dropped - she has advocated for some time the dropping of the case and the charges.
She hasn’t advocated; she’s responded that she’s forgiven him. As you might also do if your assailant has a ton rabid fans who will make your life hell if you don’t. She doesn’t want to deal with this shit, and that’s understandable. But it doesn’t hold up legally. She already pressed charges and he already admitted guilt.
And there are plenty of people in prison right now who have suffered far more than Polanski and those traumas in many cases lead them to perpetrate their crimes. Where’s their pass?
haha. I think perhaps I took your rhetorical question literally and decided to helpfully answer with the popular arguments. Personally, my only feeling on the subject in Polanski’s view is that the plea agreement was 90 days, he served 42 days, and this is a lot of time, pain and brouhaha so some guy can serve 48 measly days. But hey. If it makes the State of California feel better, and that’s how they want to spend their money, then rock on. I also worry that, given his copious resources and the fog of time, that he may actually get off. That would be unfortunate.
The sentence following plea agreement was not 90 days—Polanski says he thought it was. The court had released him to state prison for a 90 day psychiatric evaluation. I don’t think this was the entirety of his sentence.
Anyway, there are plenty of people don’t even get off on the lesser charge (sex with a minor, nevermind rape and drugging) for 90 days in this country when the age difference is a matter of one or two years between two consenting teenagers. The notion that a 47 year old who rapes a 13 year old should get a pass is ludicrous.
City to Take Bids on Union Square Pavilion in 2 Months
The Post reports that the city will start taking bids for the restaurant space in the refurbished pavillion on the northern end of Union Square in two months. Though neighborhood types protested the use of the space—as well as the co-chair of the development corporation Mr. Danny Meyer—arguing it should be a public space, not a business, judges eventually ruled that the seasonal cafe will go forward as planned. The winning restaurateur will get a 15 year lease to run the cafe for six months out of the year, with the option to operate a "a satellite cart or kiosk."
For those hoping for a Shake Shack: no dice. Not only would it be uncouth of the city to award two huge park bids to the restaurateur and a conflict of interest given Danny Meyer's seat on the business improvement district, but he also signed an affidavit back in '08 promising he would not try to get the space. But that's not stopping Donald Trump (or the Olive Garden!) from giving it a go. This place could be a goldmine.
· Activists, pols 'Square' off over café in park [NYP]
· Previous Coverage of the Union Sq. Pavilion [~E~]
Subway yearbook?
A recent Improv Everywhere endeavor had a photo booth set up in a New York subway car. They told riders that the MTA had hired them to take photographs of every person who used the subway, and that there would be a yearbook at the end of the year. The result was one interesting, if misinformed, class.
Tags: improv new york subway
A Moveable Tweet: The Latest from the Industry Twitterati
We present the latest edition of A Moveable Tweet, where we take a look at the most intriguing tweets in the restaurant industry.
Grant Achatz nabs a table at Rao's:
NYMag's Adam Platt has had it up to here with these chicken stories:
Ben Leventhal hears that the Clinton family stopped in Minetta Tavern before the Barbra Striesand show:
Bloomberg's Ryan Sutton finds cocktails worthy of their $45 price tag:
Gael Greene weighs in on the lobster roll at Ed's Chowder House:
Gourmet's Ruth Reichl gets weird and wistful:
Slice's Adam Kuban is getting paranoid:
Food & Wine's Dana Cowin is stinking up a plane:
William Safire, 1929-2009
William Safire, “a college dropout and proud of it, a public relations go-getter who set up the famous Nixon-Khrushchev ‘kitchen debate’ in Moscow, and a White House wordsmith in the tumultuous era of war in Vietnam, Nixon’s visit to China and the gathering storm of the Watergate scandal, which drove the president from office,” died yesterday at the age of 79. I’m having a hard time coming up with anything nice to say about him, so I will just mention that I once heard him make a joke about how the first Monday in October (the beginning of the annual Supreme Court term) was conservatives’ real Daylight Savings Time, since that’s when they had a chance to turn back the clock. Which I guess is kind of funny if you think about how true it is. Anyway, the man is dead.
Not Sure I Understand Either
Sort of sad that the president has to have conversations like this ...
"One of the [G20] leaders, I won't mention who it was, he comes up to me and ... he says, 'Barack, explain to me this health care debate.' He says, 'We don't understand it. You're trying to make sure everyone has health care and they're putting a Hitler moustache on you. That doesn't make sense to me, explain that to me,'" Obama said. "He didn't understand."
See the video here.
Results of Michael Ruhlman's BLT-from-Scratch Challenge
One Hungry Chef's DIY BLT flowchart.
Earlier this summer, food writer Michael Ruhlman challenged his readers to make BLTs from scratch and to go as "from scratch" as possible.
This morning, Ruhlman announced the winners on his site. Among various categories--Best BLT Photo, Best BLT Interpretation, Most Inspirational BLT--was the Best Over All BLT, made by Jared Dunnohew of One Hungry Chef. As his cool flow chart shows, Dunnohew did almost everything short of raising the pig and growing the wheat.
He foraged in parks for herbs for the bread, the homemade mustard, and the pork cure. He harvested his own sea salt (25 liters of ocean water yields 1 kilogram of salt, he reports). He grew his own tomatoes, lettuce, and chives. And he made his own vinegar cider (used in his homemade mayo).
In addition to Dunnohew's creation, there's just a wealth of BLT ideas here. I particularly like Feeding Maybelle's BLT savory pie.
William Safire's Finest Speech [History]
Columnist and presidential speechwriter Bill Safire was one of only three non-disloyal Jews President Nixon could name. Here is the speech he drafted for Nixon to read in case the Apollo 11 Astronauts became stranded on the moon!
It is a wonderful piece of alternate universe American history, in which President Nixon had to explain to a nation that Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong were going to die on the moon.
A bite of baby
A farmer in China has grown pears in the shape of babies. Using fiberglass and plastic moulds, Hao Xianzhang has been able to cultivate fruit in the shape of newborns. The popularity likely extends beyond those who catch the literary reference: in the Chinese novel Journey to the West a mythical fruit in the shape of an infant bestows immortality to all who consume it. Xianzhang's pears cost $7 (50 yuan) each, not too pricey for a piece of the eternal. For those who aren't inclined to snack on athanasia, the farmer plans on growing fruit in the shape of other figures, including comedy icon Charlie Chaplin.
Yo, Ainsley's back
As you may have already noticed, Ainsley Drew is back and will be helping me out here for the next couple of weeks on a part time editorial basis as my wife and I deal with our new houseguest. (I'll be posting stuff as well...just at odd hours.) Welcome, Ainsley!
Tags: Ainsley Drew kottke.org
On the Street....One More Time, Milano
About two years ago on a very misty, lazy Sunday morning in Milan I ran across this gentleman as he prepared for his Sunday bike ride. He was dressed so elegantly for a Sunday ride, but I guess I should expect that from Milanese by now. Our conversation was very brief and I forgot to get any of his contact information. I was very happy with the shot, but thought I would never run across him again.
Well, as I was shooting around the Versace show I see just the floating head of this gentleman glide by (his body and bike were hidden by a car). Traffic was heavy so as he slowed to navigate the cars and fashionistas I caught up to him and asked to take his photo. I was surprised when he instantly recognized me, "Yeah, you are The Sartorialist!, Cunningham!"
That Bill casts a long shadow.
This time I got his info, so hopefully we will be seeing more of Mr. Alborghetti on future Milan trips.
September 27, 2009
andrea & julia. bad picture but great energy. (via yatta)
bad picture but great energy.
(via yatta)
Disappearing Act Dept.
My NYAF report is up at AMN -- and it's the last piece I'm doing for them of that size. After this the only things I'll be writing for them are reviews of material that I was already covering (like Black Jack), but no new series. I'm going to be focusing on building up Genji Press -- both the site and the books under that imprint.
On a side note, I found a good way to deal with uploading a whole slew of images to Flickr without driving yourself bonkers.
1. Install the Flickr Uploadr utility, if you haven't already.
2. (Optional but useful) Set Uploadr to resize everything to, say, 1600 pixels across.
3. Open images in an image browser that has some kind of right-click Open With shell-integration function. Windows Live Photo Gallery is just about perfect for this (and was what I used for this whole process).
4. Browse. When you get to an image you like, right-click on it and select Open With, and then select Uploadr as the target.
5. Each image selected in this fashion will be added to the current batch of Flickr images, and you can then go back to the image browser app without losing context.
This way you don't have to go back and forth between the browser and the Uploadr, and can upload tons of images much more efficiently.
ninety9: While everyone is dusting off their Free Polanski rant (kids — he’s the ‘auteur’ who thinks...
While everyone is dusting off their Free Polanski rant (kids — he’s the ‘auteur’ who thinks 13-year old girls hopped up — down? — on ‘ludes is sexy backdoor time action), can someone give me the definitive “No, really it wasn’t rape, but here is why sex with a 13-year old you just fed fucking drugs to is okay” argument? Cause I’m curious how that one is sold. And then heading right to the nearest grade school playground. Kidding! Maybe!Well, the excuse for a certain WaPo columnist is But My Husband Is a Polish Official Who’s Lobbying on Polanski’s Behalf So It Must Be Okay.
Boston, Toronto Get Updated Station Maps
Boston's MBTA is upgrading the maps in its stations; some of the neighbourhood maps haven't been upgraded in 40 years. The system maps show services that will not be operational for another month, but that's nothing compared to the trouble with Toronto's station maps. The Toronto Transit Commission has gotten...
William Safire quotations
Knowing how things work is the basis for appreciation, and is thus a source of civilized delight. And: The right to do something does not mean that doing it is...
Remembering William Safire
I want to take a moment to remember William Safire for his kindness.
He was unstinting with his help in matters that were important to me. He gave generous public praise to my radio show, A Way with Words. He supported the Historical Dictionary of American Slang when it applied for funding during my editorship, by writing letters of support that shone with erudition and respect. He gave my book, the Oxford Dictionary of American Political Slang, a much kinder review than it deserved. He gave a cover blurb for my Official Dictionary of Unofficial English. He mentioned Wordnik, my latest project, in his column, generating interest from many thousands. He consented to a long interview about his political dictionary.
Perhaps most importantly, he gave me credit as often as possible in his column for helping him with his research, which allowed my own star to rise in the "language dodge," which is what he called this maven-rich, grammarizing, languagey niche we both inhabited. He did this for lots of people and he did it unbegrudgingly.
Thanks, Bill. You were kind.
Are You On Twitter?
If you're on Twitter, definitely follow me at twitter.com/joshtpm. I keep you updated on the best offerings of the day from our news blog as well as give updates on new stuff we have coming from TPM -- new features, hires, stories we're going to start digging in on, etc.
I'd also strongly encourage you to follow the main TPMmedia twitter feed which we've just relaunched -- ditching the old extremely lame RSS-based system and placing under new bona-fide homo sapiens management.
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