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November 14, 2009
Personism » House On Fire I’m absolutely crazy about...
I’m absolutely crazy about this photo — MacLean, Virginia, 1978 by Joel Sternfeld.
Topps Mayo Review
I’m a big fan of retro-themed products. This year alone I have fallen for T-51 Murad Basketball, Allen & Ginter Baseball, and to some extent, Topps Mayo Football.
For me, I still have a bad taste left in my mouth from the disastrous 2008 Mayo release, which promised more than it delivered and left many football collectors upset with Topps.
This year, Topps ditched the black & white base cards for a more Allen & Ginter style version. The base cards and relics look great, as do the mini parallels and variations. The autographs on the other hand, don’t quite live up to the retro theme.
Unfortunately, much like T-51 Basketball, Topps used stickers for the autographs. While they are the more subtle clear labels, it does bring down the feel of the product. Would Allen & Ginter be as popular if it featured stickers?
As for Mayo, it’s a great-looking product but for a collector that’s been recently spoiled by Topps Finest and Topps Chrome, it lacks the excitement those more flashy releases bring to the table.
Information:
Current eBay price – $75+
Guarantees – One relic & autograph per box
Look for – Cut signatures, rip cards, quad autographs
The Good:
Great designs runs through entire product
Excellent mini parallel variations
The Bad:
Sticker autographs on a retro-themed product
Results:
Relic – Ronnie Brown
Autograph – Gartrell Johnson
Final Grade: B
"A radical departure from the skinny-pants trend of the past
"A radical departure from the skinny-pants trend of the past few years, the baggy trousers can take some getting used to. Jean Hall, 24, says the low-slung crotch of her American Apparel African-print harem pants got caught on her bike pedal while she was riding through Brooklyn, causing her to fall off. Her friend, who was riding with her, wrote about the incident on Twitter."via online.wsj.com
This is probably the most ridiculous, yet most wonderful paragraph of any Wall Street Journal article ever.
bohemea: Cate Blanchett - Vogue by Annie Leibovitz, December...
Cate Blanchett - Vogue by Annie Leibovitz, December 2009
Headline: Older actress doesn’t get botox, can make expressions!
Brooklynflea Community
Wondering what the new "Community" tab on the site is all about? (We know you didn't notice.) Starting this week, dozens of Flea vendors have started writing their own posts, on everything from what they're bringing to market this weekend (a Steampunk doghouse, e.g.) to their latest pumpkin pie recipe (thanks Whimsy + Spice). The best part: you can post there too! Just join the Community and then you can ask the vendors to find you, say, a George Nelson coffee table, or an old Brooklyn map, or a new flavor of pickle. What other flea is so virtually advanced? It's new, it's hip, and we have no idea what to expect—always the best recipe for fun. Check it out, and let the fireworks begin. via www.brooklynflea.com
Read: Alfonzo Wants to Retire a Met
Edgardo Alfonzo would like to finish his career with the Mets, according to Kevin Kernan of the New York Post.
According to Kernan, the 36 year old Alfonzo believes he has two or three years left in him, and would like a chance to go to Spring Training with the Mets.
Alfonzo told Kernan:
“I’m prepared for anything,” Alfonzo said earlier this week. “Baseball is the one thing in my life that I know how to do. I don’t expect to play every day, but I feel I can help anytime. I can say many things with my mouth, but I have to prove it…“My dream is to retire with the Mets colors…That’s my dream. That’s what I’m praying for, maybe it will happen, maybe not, but dreams sometimes come true, you know.”
…i suppose an invite can’t hurt, just to give him a chance to retire in a Mets uniform…it would be similar to when the team invited Andres Gallaraga to camp in 2005…i guess you never know, but fonzie hasn’t exactly shined in a real long time, which is a reason he has been out of the majors for three full seasons…
Alfonzo last played in the Major Leagues in 2006 when he appeared in 30 games with the Angels and hit .126, and has played with the Long Island Ducks, the Mexican and Venezuelan Leagues, and most recently, the Yomiuri Giants this past season.
For more on Alfonzo, check out Kernan’s article here.
Pitch yourself, not your idea
There is a widespread myth that the most important part of building a great company is coming up with a great idea. This myth is reflected in popular movies and books: someone invents the Post-it note or cocktail umbrellas and becomes an overnight millionaire. It is also perpetuated by experienced business people who, for the most part, don’t believe it. Venture capitalists often talk about “the best way to pitch your idea” and “honing your elevator pitch.” Most business schools have business plan contests which are essentially beauty pageants for startup ideas. All of this reinforces the myth that the idea is primary.
The reality is ideas don’t matter that much. First of all, in almost all startups, the idea changes – often dramatically – over time. Secondly, ideas are relatively abundant. For every decent idea there are very likely other people who’ve also thought of it, and, surprisingly often, are also actively pitching investors. At an early stage, ideas matter less for their own sake and more insofar as they reflect the creativity and thoughtfulness of the team.
What you should really be focused on when pitching your early stage startup is pitching yourself and your team. When you do this, remember that a startup is primarily about building something. Hence the most important aspect of your backgrounds is not the names of the schools you attended or companies you worked at – it’s what you’ve built. This could mean coding a video game, creating a non-profit organization, designing a website, writing a book, bootstrapping a company – whatever. The story you should tell is the story of someone who has been building stuff her whole life and now just needs some capital to take it to the next level.
Of course a great way to show you can build stuff is to build a prototype of the product you are raising money for. This is why so many VCs tell entrepreneurs to “come back when you have a demo.” They aren’t wondering whether your product can be built – they are wondering whether you can build it.
November 13, 2009
The Mysterians
Filed under: on kids
Lately I've been finding copies featuring small hands and feet by the printer.
Tags: kids, like father like son, xeroxes
Sponsor:
TWO BLUE CARS: Your kid's favorite shirt.
Why the collection is important
In response to my post about the new editorial tools I am using, Bill Seitz asked why it's so important to have a representation of the pre-rendered content stored in public on the web. My first answer was incomplete, I said I wanted an archive. I don't feel comfortable having the only copy of things I write reside on servers of corporations who might decide at some point they're not interested in continuing to store the stuff, or might have a technical failure and lose the stuff. Or whatever. Praise Murphy.
But there's another even more important reason. I hope that at some point we might swing back with everyone having their own home base and that we might still have the benefit of real-time updates, and scatter the bits all over creation. I want the best of both worlds. A place where all my writing is collected and preserved and can be commented on, and having that same content appear in as many other places as people want to view it. This was the point of syndication in the first place, to give people lots of options for viewing. And while not many people knew about the cloud element in RSS, it was there since 2001, so I don't think I have to work too hard to persuade anyone that real-time updates was always part of the vision of RSS. It was.
If we're going to get there, we have to start. That's what I'm doing, starting.
Our Community
We have a variety of ways to talk to each other on Bike Hugger — via Twitter, Flickr, comment threads, sending us tips, saying hello, and now with a community.
We tried out the community app — built with TypePad Motion — last month during our Mobile Social Worldwide and updated that today to our main community.
Post Something
Sign up via TypePad’s Typekey service to share your links, photos, and videos. The community works like a wall. You can start your own discussions, follow each other, and not have to wait for us to post a topic.
I wrote earlier about the technology behind the app, likening it to “a Magical Unicorn that fills your blog with sunshine.”
The magic happens when you share your stuff with us.
Gainsbourg: Vie Héroïque
via Stereogum
There's a Serge Gainsbourg biopic, Gainsbourg: Vie Héroïque, coming out in January! I love Gainsbourg and find him endlessly fascinating, so this is exciting, and the trailer looks great.
Arceus and the Plates
As many pokémon fans know, the new Arceus being given away in Australia and at Toys-R-Us in the US and Puerto Rico unlocks a special event in the upcoming HeartGold and SoulSilver games and brings Cynthia to Johto and gives gamers a chance to receive Palkia, Dialga or Giratina with a special move at level 1. Many may forget that unlocking events by having event pokemon in your party started in Platinum and if you take your new Arceus to the Oreburgh Mine you will meet a traveler who will give you a brief history of the plates and hand over a Flame Plate to you. If you travel to the Canalave City Library you can meet up with him again and he will will fill you in on some pokemon history relating to Arceus and the plates and he will leave a book in the Canalave Library that details all the inscriptions that have been found on the plates since Diamond & Pearl.
Arceus has the unique ability of Multitype that allows it to become the type of whatever plate that it holds. While the Flame Plate can be found in Stark Mountain, it requires you to have the national dex which makes it the last of the plates accessible through game play. Since Arceus has now become available to so many pokémon fans, I thought it might be a good time to review where all the plates can be found:Draco Plate: Right behind the Dragon Statue in Eterna City
Insect Plate: Outside the Old Chateau to the right and against the wall of the cliff
Dread Plate: Upstairs in the room on the left of the Old Chateau
Spooky Plate: In Amity Square in Hearthome City
Mind Plate: In the last floor of the Solaceon Ruins
Fist Plate: On Route 215 behind the black belt trainer that is behind a small tree that needs to be cut
Toxic Plate: In the Great Marsh of Pastoria in the Northeast section. Against the northern tree wall in Diamond and Pearl and in the bog in Platinum.
Earth Plate: Oreburgh Gate which is the cave between Jubilife City and Oreburgh. You need Rock Smash and Strength to get back there and then Surf to the far west side of cave.Splash Plate: On Route 219 in the Southwest corner before turning into Route 220.
Iron Plate: In a small pit in the caves of Iron Island in the far southeastern corner of the third floor.
Icicle Plate: On route 217. Show the hiker in the house his lost HM Rock Climb and he will reward you with the Icicle Plate.
Zap Plate: in front of the lighthouse in Sunyshore City on the right, use Dowsing Machine
Meadow Plate: On Route 210, you need use HM Waterfall to get to it. It is against the wall beneath the bridge above the first waterfall.
Stone Plate: in the cave on Mt. Coronet, use Waterfall to access the room and it is in the rock. In Platinum, the Adamant Orb and Lustrous Orb can also be found in this room.
Sky Plate: in front of the pokemon league on the left, use Dowsing Machine
Flame Plate: on the left hand side in Stark Mountain
One plate of each type can also be found in the Underground. While any pokémon can hold these and get a 20% boost in power from those type of moves, Arceus can use them to change its typing and the typing of its signature move Judgment. Try them out, if only to see the different colors that Arceus can change in to.
Finding your MySQL High-Availability solution – Replication
In the last 2 blog posts about High Availability for MySQL we have introduced definitions and provided a list of ( questions that you need to ask yourself before choosing a HA solution. In this new post, we will cover what is the most popular HA solution for MySQL, replication.
High Availability solution for MySQL: Replication
This HA solution is the easiest to implement and to manage. You basically need to setup MySQL replication between a master and one or more slaves. Upon failure of the master, one of the slaves is manually promoted to the master role and replication on the other slaves is re-adjusted to point to the new master. This solution works well with all the MySQL storage engines including MyISAM (NDB is a special discussed later) but it suffers from the limitation of MySQL replication. The main limitation, in term of HA, is the asynchronous design of MySQL replication which does not allow the master to be sure the slave has been updated before returning after a commit statement. There is a window in time where it is possible that a fully committed transaction has not been pushed to the slave(s) leading to data loss. Many large websites that are fine with some data loss rely on replication for HA and for read scaling.
In addition to hardware failure, the level of availability of this solution is affected by the availability of the MySQL replication link between the servers. Replication often break for various reasons and while replication is broken, there is no High-Availability. Also, the availability of this solution is affected by how much the slaves were behind the master when the outage occurred. So, if you want to have a good level of availability, you need a good monitoring and alerting system to quickly react to replication issue and you need a rather small write load so that the slaves do not lag behind the master too much. To maximize the level of availability, recovery should be automatic.
Apart of its simplicity, an HA solution based on replication as many interesting properties, no wonder it is so popular. First, if the application is well designed and has specific database handles for read and write operations, this HA solution can scales the read operations to a high level. Using the slaves for reads cause a second interesting side effect, the caches of the slaves are hot so failing over to a slave means no degraded performance associated with caches warm up. Finally, it is well known that with MySQL, altering a table means recreating the whole table and it is a blocking operations. Altering a large table may takes many hours. The trick here is to run the alter table on a slave and then, once done, we let the slave catch up with the master using the new table schema, we failover to the slave and repeat the alter table on the other server. Those online schema change are easier when a master to master topology is used.
The following figure summarize the simplest HA architecture using MySQL replication. All writes are going to the master while reads are spread between the master and the slave. Upon failure of the master, replication is stopped on the slave and all traffic is redirected to the slave which now handles reads and writes.
Pros Cons Simple Variable level of availability (98-99.9+%) Inexpensive Not suitable for high write loads All the servers can be used, no idle standby read scaling only if application splits reads from writes Supports MyISAM Can lose data Caches on failover slave are not cold Online schema changes Low impact backups Automatic failover with replication
I already mentioned that for best HA levels, failover or recovery should be automatic. There are tools to manage automatic failover with replication like MMM, Flipper and Tungsten. Here, I will quickly describe the most popular one, MMM.
With MMM, you need to add a separate server, the Manager that, like the name imply, manages the availability of the MySQL service. A high availability solution based on MMM requires at the 2 MySQL servers configured in a Master to Master topology. Additional slaves can also be added. A MMM agent runs on all the MySQL servers and it is used to do OS level operations. The principle of operation of MMM is based on VIPs. There is one write VIP, where write operations are sent and as many read VIPs as the number of MySQL servers. For the write VIP, MMM monitors the state of the current master and, upon failure, try to kill all the connections to the failing server and transfer the write VIP to the other master. For the read VIPs, MMM monitors the state of the slaves and remove the read VIP of a slave if it has failed or is lagging behind the master by more than a defined threshold. One of the main limitation of MMM is its lack of fencing capability. It is important to stop all the connections to the failing master and if that server is not responding, maybe because of a network problem, a stonith device must be used to fence it. I am far from being an expert with MMM, other guys on my team are way better than me, but I heard that the MMM v1 code base had some deficiencies. MMM v2 is a complete rewrite that addresses some of the shortcomings of v1. Walter Heck from OpenQuery gave an excellent webinar on it recently.
The architecture of a highly available setup using MMM and Master-Master replication is presented on the figure below. Apart from the minimum requirement of two MySQL servers replicating each other, there is a third server, called the manager, that controls both MySQL server through an agent that is running on each server. The manager controls and monitors the state of the replication and assign virtual IPs for specific roles. There are one VIP where write operations are sent and two or more VIPs where read operations are sent. If replication on one of the MySQL servers lags behind too much, its read VIP will be moved to another server.
As a conclusion, replication can be used in many cases to build effective and scalable highly available solutions but it has some limitations. In my next blog post, I’ll present another HA solution build around Heartbeat and DRBD.
Entry posted by yves | No comment
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"New York is not afraid of terrorists"
Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-NY), whose district includes both TPM HQ and Ground Zero, issued this statement on today's announcement ...
"I thank the Department of Justice and Attorney General Eric Holder for their diligent efforts to bring to justice those who have committed acts of terrorism against the United States. In particular, I applaud the decision to bring those individuals responsible for the attack on the World Trade Center to New York to face trial in our federal courts. New York is not afraid of terrorists, we want to confront them, we want to bring them to justice, and we want to hold them accountable for their despicable actions."It is fitting that they be tried in New York, where the attack took place. On that day almost 3,000 innocent men, women, and children were murdered, and New York has waited far too long for the opportunity to hold these terrorists responsible. We have handled terrorist trials before, and we welcome this opportunity to do so again. Any suggestion that our prosecutors and our law enforcement personnel are not up to the task of safely holding and successfully prosecuting terrorists on American soil is insulting and untrue. I invite any of my colleagues who say that they are afraid to bring detainees into the United States to face trial to come to New York and see how we handle them. "Trying these alleged terrorists in New York also will allow family members of 9/11 victims to see these trials and confront these defendants in open court. These families deserve that opportunity, and I thank the Department of Justice for providing it. "Finally, I am disappointed that the Attorney General has decided to pursue cases against other Guantanamo detainees in military commissions. While Congress has reformed some aspects of that system, the military commissions are no substitute for trials in our federal courts or through courts-martial. We must ensure that these commissions are not simply used as a lesser vehicle for cases in which the evidence is not sufficient."
Video: Montreal-Style Turkey and Stuffing
Coca-Cola Turkey and Bagel Stuffing
Canada already celebrated Thanksgiving back in October, but one chef, Frédéric Morin of Joe Beef in Montreal skipped the boxed bread crumbs to make his own special spin. He combined three of the city's iconic foods: bagels, smoked meat (and pickles) from Schwartz's Deli, and maple syrup. And naturally, to add some spice to the bird, he used Montreal steak seasoning.
"Seasoning the other side [of the turkey] is like wearing clean underwear. Nobody sees them but it's just for your sake." I got to try Morin's take on the Thanksgiving classics when traveling through Montreal recently, and have to say, it was darn tasty. Why didn't we ever think of making stuffing with bagels? Watch the video, after the jump.
Montreal-Style Thanksgiving Turkey and Stuffing
Related
Video: Crappy Canadian Thanksgiving with Ellen Page and Justin Long
Montreal Bagels: St-Viateur vs. Fairmount
Alton Brown Says No to Stuffing the Turkey
Black Iron Dude, a Blog about Cast Iron Cookware
If you love cast iron cookware or want to start using it, check out Black Iron Dude for recipes that use cast iron cookware, tips on washing and seasoning your cookware (and how not to season), information on antique skillets, and just about anything else related to cast iron cookware. [via Metafilter]
Justice in New York City
I didn't live in New York on 9/11, though my wife did and was down there near the base of the buildings before they fell. I moved here in 2004. But as someone who lives here with his family, someone who's made his life here, I feel really good that the masterminds of the 9/11 attacks are going to be brought back here to the scene of the crime to face justice as criminals. This isn't just a matter of wanting to see punishment. It also vindicates our system of justice and values -- and for it all to happen here, the scene of the crime, among the people of this city, not out on some island or in some secret jail.
Listening to the questions at Attorney General Holder's press conference, I'm hearing again fears about giving the defendants a platform "to air their hateful views." But really, who is so cowardly as to worry about what these five say? Is our standing and self-respect so brittle?
Rep. Peter King (R-NY) says it makes New York City more of a target for attacks. And there's at least some logic to the argument. But fundamentally, I don't think terrorists aren't attacking New York because they don't think there's enough reason to do so. And I trust the appropriate officials will keep the city's people safe.
There's a widespread belief that many seem to have that calling these people criminals and treating them as such somehow elevates their status and diminishes the fact that al Qaeda has effectively been making war on the United States. I've never understood this mindset. The key point in World War II is that at the end of the war the Allies would not deign to accord the leaders of Germany and Japan the respect accorded to defeated armies. They were tried as criminals. Because that is what they were.
Whether it's fear that our justice system can't mete justice out to these men, or worry that KSM or the others might mouth off about us at their trial, or concern about future attacks, I am continually surprised that the voices of cowardice and fear manage to convince themselves and others that they speak for courage and determination.
'2012' is Perfect
Is "2012" art? Absolutely not. It reminds us that cinema exists not only to make art but also to expertly create sensation like no other medium. When done well, that can be just as valuable and just as astonishing. But is "2012" a sublime example of the kind of huge-budget entertainment that Hollywood does best -- indeed, the only kind of moviemaking at which Hollywood continues to excel? Yes. It is certainly the best movie of its kind ever made. It should (but surely will not) be the last movie of its kind ever made. via www.washingtonpost.com "Mr. Jacobs? This is Gary from American Express. I'm calling about potentially fraudulent activity on your Credit Card ending in 6712. It appears someone has purchased 200 tickets for a Friday night screening of 2012." "No mistake there. Thank you and goodbye."
Flicked Off: ‘2012′ is Awesome and Haters Can Suck It | The Awl
Flicked Off: ‘2012′ is Awesome and Haters Can Suck It | The Awl:This is clearly the greatest movie review ever written. The blockquote below doesn’t even do it justice.
You know who I love? I love anyone who hated this movie because I would like to fight them to the death for being wrong as balls. Fuckouttahere. I wanna be on the 2012 thrill park ride, playing 2012 on my Nintendo DS, eating the 2012-branded chocotaco and watching this movie at the same time because I am greedy for this brand of INCREDIBLEBANANASINCREDIBLE. Everyone who says otherwise may as well have written their reviews on their faces in marker because they are obviously batshit crazy and should be ignored. Seriously, will somebody tell me what people expected other than 158 minutes of apocalypse BUKKAKE?
Sixth Avenue Surprise: Trader Joe's Coming to Chelsea
The Ladies' Mile now belongs to a man called Joe. The Observer brings word that the full block of hot retail action at 675 Sixth Avenue that was last occupied by Barnes & Noble will become a Trader Joe's, the gourmet grocer's third Manhattan store after 14th Street and the planned Upper West Side outpost. Given the residential boom up and down Sixth Avenue of late, the 41,000-square-foot space in the Mattel Building (between 21st and 22nd Streets) should be just as uncomfortably packed with organic almond butter fanatics as the Union Square store, which isn't that far away. Vital questions: Will Chelsea be getting its three-buck-Chuck, or is this Joe going dry? And how will the gays react to all those unfashionable Hawaiian shirts?
· Trader Joe's Stakes Claim on Sixth Avenue [NYO]
Ed Levine's Serious Diet, Week 93: Can Pizza Be Diet Food?
From Ken's Artisan Pizza in Portland, Oregon. Read more here» [Photograph: Adam Kuban]
Why do I ask this question? Because over the course of the last few weeks, Adam and I have been hitting pizzerias all over the country for a March Madness-like tournament of pizza we are writing up for Rachael Ray Magazine and posting about on Slice.
While Adam has been to Seattle (twice), Portland, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Phoenix in the last three weeks, I have been to two pizzerias in Atlanta, five in Chicago, four in Philadelphia, one in New Haven, and half a dozen in New York City. You will be reading more about our adventures in the coming weeks, but suffice to say that it has been a lot of fun.
The last time I embarked on such an ambitious pizza regimen I was doing the primary research for Pizza: A Slice of Heaven. In that case I have estimated that I ate a thousand slices of pizza in the course of a year. The key difference? Back then I weighed 265 pounds; back then I just blythly accepted the fact that I routinely overate, because that was who I was. Back then I guess you could say that I was willing to do die for my art, or my craft, or whatever one-word descriptor I could come up with to succinctly depict what I did back then.
But then is then, and now, four years and thousands of slices later, is now. I'm intent on staying around for a long time, no matter what I do for a living, I and I have lost almost fifty pounds in an effort to do so. So how does one eat a lot of pizza and face the scale music every Friday?
Serious Pie in Seattle, Washington. Read more here» [Photograph: Adam Kuban]
I don't know for sure, but I am trying out various strategies and tactics in an effort to stave off gaining too much weight.
Thinner comes with me on every flight and train ride that involves an overnight stay. Silly, I know, but he helps. I weighed myself in Chicago, Atlanta, and Oxford—no matter how much pizza I ate the evening before, no matter how ugly the number was going to be.
Give most of the leftover pizza to other serious eaters. In Philadelphia my friends Fay Stanford and Craig LaBan ended up with a lot of pizza just so I wouldn't. The same thing happened in Chicago with Daniel Zemans, Nick Kindelsperger, and Blake Royer (all Serious Eats contributors) and in Atlanta with my friends David Lewis, Danica Kumbol, and John Kessler.
I paced myself, and I tried to know when to say when. Chicago was tough, because we did eat at five pizzerias in five hours. But I lucked out, because we happened to hit my favorite of the night first, so it was a little easier not to overeat at the next four stops.
The Weigh-In
So we are about to see if employing the above-mentioned tactics and strategies worked. My interim weigh-ins have been reasonably encouraging but inconclusive, but you know what, there's one more tactic I haven't mentioned that might be the most effective one of all: getting on the scale and posting my weight every Friday, like I'm about to do.
Facing all of you, sharing this diet adventure with serious eaters everywhere, not being afraid to post my weight for all the world to see, has helped immeasurably. Because whether I lose a pound or two or three or gain a similar amount while eating pizza or biscuits or fried chicken (hazardous duties all), you all have stayed encouraging and supportive. And that means an awful lot.
Most of all it's helped me stick with the serious diet. And I say that no matter what Thinner is going to say right now: 217. Same as last week, and 48 pounds less than I weighed when I finished Slice of Heaven.
Not bad, not bad at all after quite a few pizza-filled weeks. Many, many thanks, serious eaters.
Emily and Sarah Kunstler, Filmmakers
William Kunstler was one of America's most famous radical lawyers. In the 1960s and 1970s, he defended civil rights protesters, Martin Luther King, Jr., and The Chicago Seven. He was called in by the inmates during the Attica prison uprising, and defended members of the American Indian Movement during their 71-day standoff with the federal government at Wounded Knee, South Dakota. Later in his career, he took on a string of controversial cases, including defending clients accused in the Central Park Jogger beating, the murder of Meir Kahane, and the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center. Tonight, "William Kunstler: Disturbing the Universe" opens at theaters in New York and Boston, with a national expansion to follow. It was directed by his daughters, Emily and Sarah— we asked them some questions about their father's controversial life.
Your dad grew up in an upper middle class family here in New York, went to Yale and Columbia, and was awarded a Bronze star for his service in the Pacific during World War II. He seems to have had a thoroughly normal American upbringing— was there anything there that would have predicted the radical leftist lawyer he was to become? Emily: Dad used to tell us a story about a featherweight boxing champion named Sam Langford with whom he corresponded while he was in high school. After a few months of letters back and forth, the boxer asked dad to come watch him train at his gym. There was only problem: the boxer was black and his gym was in Harlem. Dad’s parents wouldn’t let him visit the gym, which was less than a mile from their apartment on Central Park West. He never wrote to the boxer again. His shame for not having the courage to stand up to his parent’s fears stayed with him for the rest of his life. Dad always kept a photo of Sam Langford framed on his desk, I think to remind him to have the courage to speak his mind and do what he thought was right. That same photo is on the wall of my editing room today.
Most of America got to know Bill Kunstler in 1969, for his role in the Chicago Seven Trial. But by then he was 50, and had been a lawyer for almost twenty years. How did a white lawyer living in Westchester get involved in the Civil Rights movement, and end up defending Freedom Riders, MLK, and Malcolm X? Sarah: Emily and I don’t really know the answer to this. I know that dad always wanted to do something important, and that he had a profound sense of injustice and empathy for oppressed peoples. Lately, we’ve been wondering if it had anything to do with growing up Jewish during the first half of the 20th century. When dad graduated from law school in 1948, none of the top law firms would higher Jewish lawyers. Most Jewish lawyers from that period started their own firms or went into private practice. I think that on some level, being treated as an outsider made dad think more creatively about what to do with his law degree. Conforming just wasn’t an option. So when the ACLU asked him to go to the South to observe the arrests of Freedom Riders, he leapt at the chance. There is definitely a Jewish tradition of social action in this country. Jews made up half of the young people who participated in the Mississippi Freedom Summer in 1964.
During the Chicago 7 Trial, your father invented a style of lawyering that had never been seen before in America— a blend of street theater and public relations that turned the courtroom into a circus. Why was trial so important- why is it still talked about today? Emily: As much as we’d like to give him credit for it, what happened in that Chicago courtroom wasn’t all of our father’s making. Dad learned a lot from defendants Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, Yippies who were already using humor and guerilla theater as part of their political activism. Hoffman and others had already attempted to levitate the Pentagon to exorcise its demons, and had caused a frenzy at the New York Stock Exchange by throwing dollar bills from the balcony onto the trading floor. So the Yippies taught dad how to use humor and emboldened him to use it. But something else was happening, too - Dad was becoming completely disillusioned with the American government. During the trial, Black Panther leader Fred Hampton was murdered by the Chicago Police Department. And Dad realized that the government would stop at nothing to destroy people it viewed as its enemy. More than anything else, I think it was Hampton’s death that radicalized him. He just didn’t care about the propriety of the courtroom anymore. He was going to do what he needed to do and say what he needed to say on behalf of his clients.
Sarah: I don’t know that the trial itself was all that important. It was symbolic, because it felt to many like the counterculture and America’s youth were being put on trial. I think what was important about it ultimately was the image of Bobby Seale bound and gagged in the courtroom. It was a powerful and shocking illustration of American racism, and it was seen around the world. Dad’s theatrics, the defendants theatrics, they were of a time and a place. It hasn’t really ever been replicated. But I think, in a way, it changed the way young progressive lawyers practiced law. They learned not to be afraid of a courtroom or a judge. And to fight like hell for their clients.
After the Chicago 7, your dad's first marriage broke down— he left his wife and two daughters in Westchester and hit the road, touring the country as a kind of radical leftist celebrity. That seems like the first of many times he put his work before his family life. Did he ever reconcile with his first family? Did he ever learn to put his family before his work? What kind of dad was he- did he remember your birthdays and come to your school plays? Emily: His marriage never recovered, but he always had a good relationship with our older sisters, Karin and Jane. Sarah and I were born when dad was pushing 60, so he had definitely slowed down, which was to our benefit. He was home a lot more. And his office was in the basement of our house. But he worked constantly. When I close my eyes, I see him with a stack of papers and a yellow legal pad. That’s who he was. But he loved to have us around. He used to call Sarah and me his life insurance policy, he thought that we kept him young.
Sarah: We don’t have any abandonment issues or psychological traumas to share with your readers. When he could show up for something, he showed up. When he couldn’t, he didn’t. Sometimes it was worse when he did show up. He was a really embarrassing person - when we were teenagers, Emily and I were continually mortified by him.
Sarah, you were born in 1976, the same year your dad married Margaret Ratner, a civil rights lawyer, and Emily, you came along in 1978. Right around that time your father seems to have switched the focus of his professional work. He stopped defending leftists and political protesters, and started defending more controversial figures, like the mobster John Gotti and El-Sayyid Nosair, who was accused of murdering Meir Kahane, the radical Jewish leader. What caused that shift? Sarah: Emily and I have been trying to answer this question for as long as I can remember. We just spent the past five years making a movie about it. There isn’t an easy answer. Dad started out as a movement lawyer - defending people who were a part of movements he agreed with. The strength of the social movements in the 1960s and 70s waned over time. So Dad had to take different kinds of cases. What bothered Emily and me when we were kids was that he had a choice of whom he represented, and we didn’t understand why he wanted to represent people charged with terrible crimes. It just seemed so far away from standing with Martin Luther King Jr. or the Chicago Seven or the Attica inmates.
Emily: When we were kids, we really wanted our father to be consistent. I think all kids are like that - incredibly moralistic, seeing everything as black and white, right and wrong. But I think if you asked Dad, he would probably tell you that he was being completely consistent. For him, representation of the most hated members of our society was important civil rights work. Dad believed that the government demonized criminal defendants so that society would rush to judgment without evidence and before trial. He used to talk about Goldstein, a fictional character in George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, who was imprisoned to justify Big Brother’s repressive government. Dad told us that the government was always creating Goldsteins to scare the public and justify the rollback of civil rights.
Sometimes your dad seemed to seek the spotlight for its own sake, taking roles in movies, and cases for financial gain. How much of his motivation was driven by a true desire to fight for justice, versus the need to satisfy his own ego? At bottom, was he driven by principle or self-interest? Emily: The financial gain part is wrong. Dad rarely took cases for money. He made a living largely through speaking engagements. But there were a few clients who paid. Dad represented Raymond Patriarca, a Rhode Island crime boss. Jimmy Breslin told Sarah and me that clients like Patriarca put food on the table.
Sarah: Dad definitely loved the spotlight. Back in the stone age of the early 1990s, his nightly ritual was to walk our dog around the corner to the newsstand so he could buy the evening edition of all the local papers to look for his name. But I don’t think he was ever driven exclusively by self-interest. He knew how to use the media, and recognized that by taking a case, he would elevate the profile of that case. He used his fame to bring attention to cases that would have otherwise gone on without the benefit of public scrutiny. Justice was very important to dad. He saw it as something that you strive for but never reach. We talked about justice all the time. Dad wanted us to understand that law and justice were not the same thing, and that it was our obligation to fight for what was right.
Your dad seems like a good example of the conjunction of a man and his times— a bigger-than-life personality for a crazier-than-normal age. But we live in different times— times in which a black man can become President, the Secretary of State is a woman, and state and national laws have been extended to protect racial minorities, women, and gays. Is there any cause still worth becoming a radical about? If he were alive today, what cases would your Dad be working on? Emily: Sarah and I were at the Sundance Film Festival premiering our film during the inauguration of President Obama. On Main Street in Park City, Utah, we heard people talking about how the election of a black president meant that we had “moved beyond race.” Dad would have been horrified. This nation still bears the scars of slavery, civil war, Jim Crow, lynchings, riots, and the assassinations of countless black leaders and activists. Racism is alive and well. There is still plenty of reason for outrage, and plenty of reason for activism.
Sarah: If Dad were alive, he would be representing Guantanamo detainees, and anti-war, environmental and anti-globalization protesters. He would be fighting for the release of Leonard Peltier and Mumia Abu Jamal. And he would be saying outrageous things to the press to get his name in the paper.
Sarah, what kinds of cases are you working on today? Are you interested in carrying on your dad's work? I am a criminal defense lawyer practicing in federal court in Manhattan and Brooklyn. I work with Elizabeth Fink, a colleague of my father’s who represented the Attica inmates in a landmark civil lawsuit. Liz is the most fearless person I’ve ever met. But I’m not interested in carrying on my dad’s work. I wouldn’t even know how to start. It’s time for the next generation of lawyers to determine the course of progressive lawyering.
Emily, what do you want to do next? Sarah and I are looking forward to making a movie that isn’t about our family. Our next film is going to be about racism in America.
November 12, 2009
www.perl.org - redesign
Well, it's taken me 6 weeks of evenings and the odd weekend, but I'm proud to say the new http://www.perl.org/ site has just gone live. This is a complete redesign and content review. Hopefully it's cleaner and easier for people to actually get the information they are after. Whilst I was at it I also implemented this skin for http://dbi.perl.org/ and http://learn.perl.org/ (which needs a lot more loving now you can actually see what's there... not much). My work (http://www.foxtons.co.uk/) have donated some of my time, and also some of the designers on my team's time, without which it would have taken even longer. So enjoy!Read more of this story at use Perl.
Video Games and possibilities
Two quick Unified Resource Locator that caught my eyes yesterday evening during my commute:
- Sometips by Jordan Mechner about game design principles for narrative games. The second hand “List the actions the player actually performs in the game and take a cold hard look at it. Does it sound like fun?” is an interesting filter to prioritize the interactions you want your users to be engaged in. A sort of follow-up to Crawford’s list of verbs I mentioned the other day
- Choose Your Own Adventure (thanks Carly for this), a visualization of interactive books
Why do I blog this? both are about games/entertainment but these principles/viz can be applied to other domains. I see them as important interaction design heuristics.
sorry you lost; here's your invoice.
The AP story reviewing the "highlights" of Sarah Palin's book had this interesting bit:
She reveals that about one-tenth of the $500,000 [in legal bills] was a bill she received to pay for the McCain campaign vetting her for the VP nod. She said when she asked the McCain campaign if it would help her financially, she was told McCain's camp would have paid all the bills if he'd won; since he lost, the vetting legal bills were her responsibility.Wow. Really?
(via davidenos) Fantastic work, David.
(via davidenos)
Fantastic work, David.
Are women writers underrated?
Harriet Evans on the critics' reception and perception of male vs female writers. In short:[B]ooks about young women are seen as frivolous and silly, while books about young men's lives that cover the same topics, are reviewed and debated, seen as valid and interesting contributions to the current social and media scene.(via mamr)
First Rule Of Facebook Connect: You Do Talk About Fight Club
This is all kinds of awesome. For its upcoming 10th anniversary addition of David Fincher’s film Fight Club, Fox has created a website that uses Facebook Connect in one of the best ways I’ve ever seen. Once the site loads up (it takes a little while since it’s Flash-based), you simply hit a button to Connect and you’re off. The result is a mash-up of scenes from the film along with random pictures of you on Facebook.
It also pulls your name, and other details from your Facebook profile such as your career. For example, at one point, it flashes the following message to me, “you are squandering your potential as a writer.” Interesting.
I took a video grab below of it in action, but unfortunately, it doesn’t capture the sound. You need to watch this for yourself to get the full effect. Do it now. You are not your f*cking khakis.
Update: And in one of those awesome little moments of coincidence, commenter Ron reminds us that it is none other than David Fincher who is currently filming The Social Network, the new movie about Facebook, which presumably, the company isn’t too happy about.
[images: Fox]
Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
Flicked Off: ‘2012′ is Awesome and Haters Can Suck It
You know who I love? I love anyone who hated this movie because I would like to fight them to the death for being wrong as balls. Fuckouttahere. I wanna be on the 2012 thrill park ride, playing 2012 on my Nintendo DS, eating the 2012-branded chocotaco and watching this movie at the same time because I am greedy for this brand of INCREDIBLEBANANASINCREDIBLE. Everyone who says otherwise may as well have written their reviews on their faces in marker because they are obviously batshit crazy and should be ignored. Seriously, will somebody tell me what people expected other than 158 minutes of apocalypse BUKKAKE? Roland Emmerich knows how to destroy himself some world and sure it isn’t so much a story but a sprayfest of rapid-fire money shots but what else would it be? And what else would make it THIS AWESOME? It’s like the movie has ultra-oxygenated blood and sleeps upside down in a hyperbaric chamber and eats tiger penis like it’s its job because it has psycho endurance that feels GREAT in your brain.
And I’m NOT sorry that I find it spectacularly satisfying to watch all these teeny tiny career-having, property-owning, H1N1 vaccine sucking-up CGI strangers EAT IT with the backdrop of a steaming, fetid Los Angeles getting fucked sideways by buildings and malls all angry-style and every single shit-eating, soul-killing highway being lobbed like al dente spaghetti against the fridge door of the OCEAN. You get to see that expensive-ass Hawaii MELT and Rio swallows itself with the dignity of someone being eaten by his own asshole AND Vegas gets it because over-tanned mongoloids in ugly clothes are flammable. This movie’s great. It’s like how aggressive people like crunchy snacks times a MILLION.
John Cusack is in it. So is Oliver Platt. And Amanda Peet. And Thandie Newton and also Chiwetel Ejiofor and Woody Harrelson and ZERO causal explanations as to why the Earth’s core is spazzing the fuck out other than the mega convenient Deus ex Mexican title but OH MY PSHAW WHO CARES. Well, other than that Cusack doesn’t suck like that strokeface Nic Cage and and it’s cool cause he moonlights as a chauffeur and gets to be dressed like he’s in Gross Pointe Blank basically the whole time. Also, his name is Jackson Curtis which makes me laugh and laugh thinking how rad it would’ve been if it were not opposite day but inversion day and 50 Cent was playing himself as the lead. The only gripe I do have is with that the Internet straight-up does not exist in 2012 because seriously they just Photoshopped it out of the picture and that’s some horseshit because the Twitter feed would’ve been HILARIOUS (#drowninghurts).
I mean, obviously 2012 has nothing to do with the Mayan apocalypse or the perseverance of what makes us human or the shifting of tectonic plates or what we’ll be called when we’re Pangea for whatever tessellation of blue and green comes next, but it does make you think about how you’d want to go if you had only had a couple of hours to live because unceremonious death is a major theme in the real-life version of 2009. I am pretty sure I will be wearing a full-length chinchilla furside-in, munching on fistfuls of MDMA, eating chips, and just trying to live long enough to not have to talk to my parents or anyone who knows me but still get to see and howl at enough mind-blowing violence to FEEL THE RAPTURE.
Watch the movie. It’s good for morale. It’s seriously as close as you’ll get to whatever David Carradine went looking for. Even though I’d have preferred if EVERYONE DIED because it’s way funnier and because honestly, what’s more anticlimactic than living?
Mary Choi was promoted to the position of The Awl’s Chief Film Critic while she was writing this post.
Off the screen and onto your desk: Mac OS X Calculator app done in atoms, not bits
Filed under: Accessories, Cult of Mac
The creative minds at Mintpass have taken applications we're all pretty familiar with and brought us ideas that make the TUAW bloggers drool. Recently, they created Mint Calculator #4; a concept that pulls the calculators from both the Mac OS and Windows out of the screen and places them on your desk -- as real, physical desk accessories.
The picture to the right is a mockup of the Mac OS calculator application, made into a real life calculator with mashable buttons and the typical aluminum style of Apple products.
The creator says that the Apple product would cost more to manufacture than its Windows counterpart because of the aluminum it would need. I'm tempted to reference the "Apple tax" (which I truly believe doesn't exist, so I'll just leave it alone). The Mac OS calculator definitely looks nicer than the Windows version -- which looks more like a toy than a usable product -- but from a design standpoint that shouldn't come as a surprise. In fairness, the Windows calculator is based on the XP version and not the snazzier Windows 7 accessory.TUAWOff the screen and onto your desk: Mac OS X Calculator app done in atoms, not bits originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Thu, 12 Nov 2009 15:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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perl.org gets a beautiful upgrade
Robert Spier writes
To match the massive advances in Perl over the last few years, www.perl.org has been brought into the modern era. www.perl.org has been completely redesigned, making it clearer and easier to use. All the content has been reviewed and brought up-to-date to provide links and other helpful resources for both new and experienced Perl programmers.
Thanks to www.foxtons.co.uk for donating time from Leo Lapworth, Stephen Morgan, and Cameron Richmond!
Holy cow is it pretty. Thanks to those who made it happen! The download page is especially handy.
Git and code review tools
I'm wondering what's out there for code reviews for pure git projects. So far I've found:
- http://code.google.com/p/gerrit/ that you can view in action with android: https://review.source.android.com/ It looks featureful, but also very painful to setup if you are not a java person?
- review board http://www.reviewboard.org/ which supports more than git. I know some are allergic to the UI. Another drawback is that the workflow is not really geared toward git as far as I can judge
- github and the like? I guess you could use the comment feature to have a very minimal UI, maybe you can have a set of hooks to do email notifications? That looks a bit hackish, and also forces you to externalize the code-review unless you go for the standalone github server?
Anything else?
Can't top this
Shared by Buster
True.Getting someone to switch is really difficult.
Getting someone to switch because you offer more of what they were looking for when they choose the one they have now is essentially impossible. For starters, they're probably not looking for more. And beyond that, they'd need to admit that they were wrong for not choosing you in the first place.
So, you don't get someone to switch because you're cheaper than Walmart. You don't get someone to switch because you serve bigger portions than the big-portion steakhouse down the street. You don't get someone to switch because your hospital is more famous than the Mayo Clinic.
The chances that you can top a trusted provider on the very thing the provider is trusted for are slim indeed.
Instead, you gain converts by winning at something the existing provider didn't think was so important.
Solange: "Stillness is the Move"
Oh, wow! Solange--whose Sol-Angel and the Hadley St. Dreams was one of my favorite albums of 2008--has covered the Dirty Projectors' "Stillness is the Move", one of my favorite songs of 2009. I love it.
Via Lizzyville.
To India With Love Raises Money for the Taj Public Service Welfare Trust
All you regulars here at MMBlog know that Mr. Mickey loves and j'adores India. Thus, you can imagine Mr. Mickey's excitement when he was invited to contributed to the book To India With Love: From New York to Mumbai out now via Assouline and edited by Waris Ahluwalia, Tina Bhojwani and Mortimer Singer. A parade of glamourpusses muse on their reasons for loving India and its people. The proceeds from the book go to the Taj Public Service Welfare Trust which is a Bombay version of New York's 9-11 Fund, to raise money for those affected by the Bombay terrorist attacks of November 26th, 2008. MM wrote about his love for Bombay and the people there. Run out and buy the book. It makes a gorgeous holiday gift and it's for a wonderful cause!!!
Chrome for Mac due in December?
Filed under: Software, Freeware, Developer
I sure thought Google Chrome was already out for Mac, but apparently that was just a developer preview -- they haven't yet done an official release (it's been a tough road to travel, I guess). But the wait is almost over, according to Mashable.
They've spotted a message on a developer list that hints at a beta release as soon as this December, assuming the extensions team gets their BrowserActions ready, the code clears the appointed timelines, and the stars align over the Pegasus constellation in the fifth quadrant. (Can you tell I don't know anything about what it takes to ship a new browser? Or, for that matter, about astrology?)
But I do know something about using browsers, and it'll be nice to finally have an official version of Chrome to run on the Mac. There have been a couple of unofficial attempts at getting the base software running, but especially since I plan to use more and more of Google Wave, being able to run it in the "official" Google browser will be nice.TUAWChrome for Mac due in December? originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Thu, 12 Nov 2009 13:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Note: Orlando Hudson grew up a Mets Fan
In July, the Daily News wrote, “Growing up in South Carolina, Orlando Hudson dreamed of playing for the Mets. Even though he grew up in Braves country, Hudson loved Darryl Strawberry and was a proud Mets fan.”
…i will not lie, things like that influence me… Nelson Figueroa has a similar story, about growing up a Mets fan idolizing doc, darryl and others… i don’t know, i just like the idea of people on my favorite team understanding my experience as a fan, specifically a Mets fan growing up in the 80s… that said, you also have to it, run and catch the ball…
In September, Jon Heyman of SI.com said the Mets might try to trade Castillo this winter, ‘and take a look at Hudson,’ who was just named the Glove Glove winner at second base for the National League.
…as i wrote last night, the buzz from LA continues to suggest the Dodgers will not look to bring hudson back… i mean, they barely used him in the post season, and he essentially lost his starting job to Ronnie Belliard… but, from what i can gather, he was pretty exhausted, needed a day off, Joe Torre kept pushing him out there, and he fizzled a bit… of course, hudson didn’t say a word, which i think speaks to his professionalism…
…like i said, i just don’t want to see the Mets trade Luis Castillo, but then turn around and make the same mistake with hudson, giving him a long-term deal that they eventually might regret… i am all for hudson at second base for the Mets, but let’s take it one year at a time… i still think i would prefer to acquire Reds 2B Brandon Phillips, but that might mean taking on a Bronson Arroyo or Aaron Harang, as well… whereas, hudson would be a free agent… for more on phillips being available in trade, click here…
Hudson hit .283 with a .357 OBP, 35 doubles, nine HR and 62 RBI in 149 games for the Dodgers in 2009.
Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post's poll.
Plus, there'd be butts strewn in the grass
A history of baseball and chewing tobacco in Slate. How things change (emphasis added):
The sudden decline of former batting champion and career .308 hitter Michael "King" Kelly--he hit just .189 in 1892 and was only able to play 78 games--was attributed to his longtime habit of smoking while patrolling the outfield.
Never mind the chaw. Can you imagine Johnny Damon, chilling out in left field, with a cigarette dangling from his lip? How does a guy shag flies while smoking?
George W. Bush Chooses UVa. For Oral History Project
Former President George W. Bush has chosen he Miller Center of Public Affairs at the University of Virginia to conduct a "comprehensive oral history of his presidency."
The Miller Center and Bush's foundation announced the George W. Bush Oral History Project this morning, saying the university's scholars will do 100 interviews with the Bush Cabinet and outside advisers during the 5-year project.
"This oral history project will offer future generations a comprehensive look at what it was like to lead the country during some extraordinary challenges," Bush said in a statement.
Professor Russell Riley, chair of the program, said the goal is to get officials to speak candidly in order to help future generations understand the Bush presidency.
"The 43rd presidency was, by any standard, among the most consequential of all in American history. We intend to hear directly from those who led the country during an exceptional time, to find out what the Bush presidency looked like from the inside--including both its successes and failures," Riley said.
The Miller Center started its oral history program in 1981 and has done projects focusing on Presidents Carter, Reagan, George H.W. Bush and Clinton.
The Bush Sr. and Clinton projects are still in progress at the Charlottesville, Va. campus, along with an extensive look at the late Sen. Ted Kennedy.
Switcheroos: Coffee Shop to Take over Chelsea Landmark, Empire Diner
Chelsea Now brings the sad news that yes, indeed, the Empire Diner will be leaving its spot in Chelsea, as suspected when it first went on the market last month. The group behind sceney Union Square restaurant Coffee Shop is taking over the space and will reopen it with a new menu and new name but the same look:
"...the restaurant will essentially stay in 'pretty much the same form that it is now,' except with a 'Coffee Shop flavor,' Benitez said. The diner will continue to serve food around the clock, and the menu will get some 'classic American' tweaking..."
The current owners and management team, who have been there for over 30 years, insist the deal hasn't been finalized yet and are trying to hold onto the space. If all goes forward as the landlord and Team Coffee Shop plan, they'll take over the space on December 31.
· Fallen Empire: New tenant found for 10th Ave. diner [Chelsea Now]
· Empire Diner, a Chelsea Icon, For Lease [~ENY~]
Lorenzo's New Gig
While people keep asking Lorenzo Martone about his impending nuptials with Marc, we were more interested to read about his new business venture in this morning's NY Post.
Martone and former Elite marketing director Ryan Brown have created ARC NY, a public relations agency just for models. They told Page Six: "Our goal is to build equity around the girl's personality." That means helping them branch out into other projects like acting, singing and product lines.
So far they've lined up Lydia Hearst, Alessandra Ambrosio, Fernanda Motta, Julie Henderson, and Jessica White.
We think this sounds like a pretty cool idea. Because it's always painful to watch a celebrity (model, actress, or singer) stumble into new genres, seemingly without a plan or any guidance whatsoever. And between Lorenzo and Ryan, they've got the media savvy backgrounds and serious connections to make some really interest projects happen.
Though we can't lie and say the possible "singing" careers don't frighten us just a wee bit. But we're gonna go ahead and trust in Lorenzo's good taste on these matters.
alessandraambrosio - Model - Julie Henderson - Jessica White - Fernanda Motta
Read: Mets Prospects, Video of Ike, and Draft Picks
In the New York Post, Joel Sherman quotes an American League GM as
saying, ‘The Mets minor league talent is way under the talent base of the Phillies, Braves and Marlins.’
…i have talked with a few agents who represent young talent, and keep a close eye on the minor leagues, and, basically, no one person would say one way or the other how they feel about the Mets prospects… in short, they all feel Ike Davis is the closest person the team has to a ‘sure-thing,’ and someone they would rush to represent, but he only played in 59 games with Double-A last season… so, basically, the jury is still out on everyone, from davis to Jenrry Mejia…
Speaking of prospects…
To check out video of Davis hitting a double and a 400 foot home run in the Arizona Fall League, go to Mets Minor League Blog.
…he drops his hands, which end up in a strong hitting position, but that will do him zero good against a high-in-the-zone, major-league fastball… nevertheless, he has a long, fluid swing… i look forward to watching him play in spring training…
To see video and read a scouting report of Mets 23-year-old pitcher Eric Beaulac, go to Mike Newman’s Scouting the Sally.
Beaulac was 7–7 with a 2.95 ERA in 116 innings, during which he struck out 133 batters, for Low-A Savannah.
Speaking of prospects, check out Ken Davidoff’s report in today’s Newsday, in which he explains how draft-pick compensation will work for the Mets next season, based on this year’s free-agent class.
Bisha-ga-tsuku
A collection of illustrations detailing the anatomy of Japanese folk monsters.
Above, the Bisha-ga-tsuku:
The monster — which maintains a body temperature of -150 degrees Celsius — is constantly hidden behind a fog of condensation, but its presence can be detected by the characteristic wet, slushy sound (”bisha-bisha“) it makes. Anatomical features include feelers that inhale human souls and cold air, a sac for storing the sounds of beating human hearts, and a brain that emits a fear-inducing aura. The Bisha-ga-tsuku reproduces by combining the stolen human souls with the cold air it inhales.
(via dj)
Tricked Out Magazines
This morning's Times tells of more bad news for Condé Nast, or rather actual numbers on news we already knew would be ugly. The company's ad pages are down by 1/3 or 8359 pages. W is one of the worst hit, down by 46%. Oof, that's definitely gotta hurt.
We're all well aware of the cost-cutting that's already gone on. So what to do next to get readers and advertisers excited?
Apparently InStyle thinks it has an idea. Its December Taylor Swift cover has a 3-D component wherein you hold up the magazine to a webcam and see a 45 second video of Taylor surrounded by snowflakes.
The 3-D theme continues inside with a bunch of advertiser participants like Michael Kors and YSL Beauté. We're not quite sure exactly how this works since we don't have the actual issue in hand, but according to WWD there are click-to-buy features and videos. And it sounds like the advertisers are pretty jazzed about it...at least for now.
Don’t Forget About Ben Sheets
In a market with such injury prone aces as Rich Harden and Erik Bedard available to teams this offseason, it can be easy to forget about one ace who missed all of 2009 on the shelf. That would be Ben Sheets, the former ace of the Milwaukee Brewers, who spent the entire season recovering from an elbow injury suffered at the end of the 2008 season, and whose elbow injury negated a two-year contract he had signed with Texas.
As a fan of the Milwaukee Brewers last season, I really missed Ben Sheets, as the Brewers starting pitching staff combined for a miserable 13.1 runs above replacement. Still, it had been nearly as disappointing watching, year after year, as Sheets missed more and more time due to injury. From 2005-2008, Sheets only averaged 150 innings per season. He missed significant time each season, only making more than 30 starts once, in 2008, before his season-ending injury which caused him to miss all of 2009.
Of course, that doesn’t mean that Sheets doesn’t bring value to a team. He has legitimate ace stuff. He has a career K/BB ratio of 3.85 and a career FIP of 3.56. His fastball and curveball combo is deadly, as both pitches have been worth nearly +.60 runs above average per 100 pitches over his career.
Much like with J.D. Drew, we have an example of a very talented player who just can’t seem to play a full season. Still, Sheets has potential provide value at the level of a John Lackey type pitcher. Since 2002, Sheets has provided 29.8 WAR, or 3.8 per season (excluding 2009). That total WAR mark ties him for 16th of the win value era with Tim Hudson, who has thrown 200 more innings over that time frame. It’s 1.5 more wins than Carlos Zambrano has in 350 fewer innings.
The thing with Sheets is that the best predictor of future injury is past injury. Because of this, it would be irresponsible of any team to expect more than 150 innings out of the former Milwaukee ace. However, unless this latest injury took all the life out of Sheets’s arm, it’s a good bet that they’ll be excellent innings, and I would expect that major league teams understand this. The question is which one is willing to take the biggest chance.
Tokyo Tyrant -The Extras Part III : Write Bottleneck
This is part 3 of my Tyrant extra’s, part 1 focused on durability, part 2 focused on the perceived performance wall.
#3. Tokyo Cabinet Can have only a single writer thread, bottlenecking performance
When writing an application using Tokyo Cabinet only one connection can be opened as a “writer” while the rest are readers. Tyrant allows for multiple “writes” to be sent in from multiple applications but it still single threads them when writing out to disk. If you run several threads all just inserting into Tyrant your will see tyrant hit 100% Cpu on 1 core, and your writes will start to peter out quickly.
In my tests when I was not disk bound (FS Cache writes) I was able to complete 4Million inserts in a little over 91 seconds using 8 threads. I actually averaged 43896.98 inserts per second during my 8 thread test. Moving to 10 threads doing the same 4Million inserts I completed the test in 96 seconds and averaged 41649.42 inserts per second. Compare this to 4 Million rows using 4 threads which averaged 40933.86 and you start to see that around 40K inserts per second is the most this particular server is capable of ( single threaded ). Hopefully this is something that maybe able to be fixed internally in the near future. Until then you may consider breaking up your data into multiple tables each with there own cache. This limit is per TC DB so this should work. I had an idea about using the memcached client to distribute the data accross multiple TC database files in the back end. This should work, I just need to test it
Ever notice how as my multi-part posts go on they get shorter and shorter:) This will be the last Tyrant related post for a little bit. The 4th & 5th posts were supposed to deal with replication and scaling… this may take a little while. Thanks for reading!
Entry posted by matt | One comment
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Harry Beck's US Interstate map
Map of the US Interstate system in the style of the London Tube map.
Go large for detail. (via coudal)
Tags: London Underground maps remix subway USA
'The Prisoner' review - Sepinwall on TV
I thought the fact that I had never seen the original version of "The Prisoner" would make me an ideal viewer for AMC's 21st-century remake. Because I had violated TV critic code and never saw more than a few minutes of the trippy '60s series about an ex-spy trapped in a bizarre, isolated community called The Village, I would have nothing to compare the new version to, and no outraged reactions of "That's not how Patrick McGoohan did it!"
November 11, 2009
Shared: Anatomy of Japanese folk monsters: This looks like the type of…
Anatomy of Japanese folk monsters: This looks like the type of thing Jason Santa Maria would lust after and collect.
Turn of the century Cooper Square
A web of elevated train tracks is flanked by sloped-roof buildings on the right and lovely Cooper Union—described in this postcard as “the Cooper Institute”—on the left.
Looks like some really sweet buildings have long since disappeared.
inbound: houston
Inbound: Houston is a public art project that will replace highway billboard advertisements with images of what the viewer would see if the billboard wasn't there. Here's an example:
Via (and more photos at) notes.husk.org.
Reflections on pigs and humans
"I look at the pig as a great animal model for human lifestyle diseases. Pigs like to lie around, they like to drink if given the chance, they’ll smoke and watch TV.”Dr. Lawrence Schook, pig researcher at University of Illinois via NY Times but read the whole story, it's filled with great quotes and general pig funniness.
PI Finds: Batting Season Finder
With the new additions to the Play Index, you can run a wider variety of queries than ever before. Here are just a few examples...
First, go to the main Batting Season Finder page. Notice that the yellow box at the top of the interface now has 5 options (in the past, there were only two, Single Seasons Totals and Totals for Combined Seasons or Careers). The third option down says "Find Players with Seasons Matching Criteria" -- click the radio button next to it. This option allows you to look for players who had the most seasons (over a career or within the span of years you choose) that match the criteria you want, so let's look for the players who have the most career 40+ HR seasons:
Rk Yrs To From Age 1 Babe Ruth 11 1920 1932 25-37 2 Alex Rodriguez 8 1998 2007 22-31 3 Barry Bonds 8 1993 2004 28-39 4 Harmon Killebrew 8 1959 1970 23-34 5 Hank Aaron 8 1957 1973 23-39 6 Sammy Sosa 7 1996 2003 27-34 7 Ken Griffey 7 1993 2000 23-30 8 Jim Thome 6 1997 2006 26-35 9 Mark McGwire 6 1987 1999 23-35 10 Willie Mays 6 1954 1965 23-34 11 Adam Dunn 5 2004 2008 24-28 12 Albert Pujols 5 2003 2009 23-29 13 Manny Ramirez 5 1998 2005 26-33 14 Frank Thomas 5 1993 2003 25-35 15 Juan Gonzalez 5 1992 1998 22-28 16 Ernie Banks 5 1955 1960 24-29 17 Duke Snider 5 1953 1957 26-30 18 Ralph Kiner 5 1947 1951 24-28 19 Jimmie Foxx 5 1932 1938 24-30 20 Lou Gehrig 5 1927 1936 24-33 You can also choose narrower criteria in conjunction with the other options in the interface -- for instance, here are the CF with the most seasons of at least 25 HR and 25 SB:
Rk Yrs To From Age 1 Willie Mays 5 1956 1960 25-29 2 Carlos Beltran 4 2002 2008 25-31 3 Eric Davis 3 1986 1988 24-26 4 Andre Dawson 3 1978 1983 23-28 5 Mike Cameron 2 2001 2002 28-29 6 Ron Gant 2 1990 1991 25-26 7 Cesar Cedeno 2 1973 1974 22-23 8 Matt Kemp 1 2009 2009 24-24 9 Grady Sizemore 1 2008 2008 25-25 10 Chris Young 1 2007 2007 23-23 11 Eric Byrnes 1 2006 2006 30-30 12 Jose Cruz 1 2001 2001 27-27 13 Preston Wilson 1 2000 2000 25-25 14 Carl Everett 1 1999 1999 28-28 15 Ray Lankford 1 1998 1998 31-31 16 Andruw Jones 1 1998 1998 21-21 17 Andy Van Slyke 1 1988 1988 27-27 18 Joe Carter 1 1988 1988 28-28 19 Lloyd Moseby 1 1987 1987 27-27 20 Rickey Henderson 1 1986 1986 27-27 21 Dale Murphy 1 1983 1983 27-27 22 Dwayne Murphy 1 1982 1982 27-27 Now, go down and select the 4th option in the yellow box, "Find Teams with Players Matching Criteria". This allows you to look for the teams which had the most players matching the criteria you choose. So here are the teams with the most 30-HR hitters (a list that includes your 2009 NL Champs):
Rk Year Tm Lg #Matching Players w/ >= 30 HR 1 2009 Philadelphia Phillies NL 4 Ryan Howard / Raul Ibanez / Chase Utley / Jayson Werth 2 2006 Chicago White Sox AL 4 Joe Crede / Jermaine Dye / Paul Konerko / Jim Thome 3 2004 Chicago Cubs NL 4 Moises Alou / Derrek Lee / Aramis Ramirez / Sammy Sosa 4 2000 Anaheim Angels AL 4 Garret Anderson / Troy Glaus / Tim Salmon / Mo Vaughn 5 2000 Toronto Blue Jays AL 4 Tony Batista / Jose Cruz / Carlos Delgado / Brad Fullmer 6 1999 Colorado Rockies NL 4 Dante Bichette / Vinny Castilla / Todd Helton / Larry Walker 7 1998 Atlanta Braves NL 4 Andres Galarraga / Andruw Jones / Chipper Jones / Javy Lopez 8 1997 Colorado Rockies NL 4 Ellis Burks / Vinny Castilla / Andres Galarraga / Larry Walker 9 1997 Los Angeles Dodgers NL 4 Eric Karros / Raul Mondesi / Mike Piazza / Todd Zeile 10 1996 Colorado Rockies NL 4 Dante Bichette / Ellis Burks / Vinny Castilla / Andres Galarraga 11 1995 Colorado Rockies NL 4 Dante Bichette / Vinny Castilla / Andres Galarraga / Larry Walker 12 1977 Los Angeles Dodgers NL 4 Dusty Baker / Ron Cey / Steve Garvey / Reggie Smith Again, you can use this with a variety of different criteria... here are the teams filled with the most rally-killers:
Rk Year Tm Lg #Matching Players w/ >=20 GIDP 1 1950 Detroit Tigers AL 4 Johnny Groth / George Kell / Johnny Lipon / Jerry Priddy 2 2009 Houston Astros NL 3 Carlos Lee / Hunter Pence / Miguel Tejada 3 2007 Baltimore Orioles AL 3 Nick Markakis / Melvin Mora / Miguel Tejada 4 2003 Chicago White Sox AL 3 Paul Konerko / Carlos Lee / Magglio Ordonez 5 1989 Oakland Athletics AL 3 Carney Lansford / Mark McGwire / Dave Parker 6 1984 Texas Rangers AL 3 Buddy Bell / Larry Parrish / Gary Ward 7 1983 Baltimore Orioles AL 3 Rich Dauer / Cal Ripken / Ken Singleton 8 1971 Minnesota Twins AL 3 Rod Carew / Harmon Killebrew / Tony Oliva 9 1943 Detroit Tigers AL 3 Jimmy Bloodworth / Dick Wakefield / Rudy York 10 1939 New York Giants NL 3 Zeke Bonura / Frank Demaree / Billy Jurges Finally, choose the 5th option down in the yellow box, "Find Seasons with Players Matching Criteria". The previous search look for teams that had the most players matching a specific criteria, but this option goes even broader and looks for entire leagues with the most players matching the requirements you set out. Here's an easy one at first, the seasons with the most 40-HR hitters:
Rk Year #Matching Players w/ 40+ HR 1 1996 16 Brady Anderson / Albert Belle / Barry Bonds / Jay Buhner / Ellis Burks / Ken Caminiti / Vinny Castilla / Andres Galarraga / Juan Gonzalez / Ken Griffey / Todd Hundley / Mark McGwire / Gary Sheffield / Sammy Sosa / Frank Thomas / Mo Vaughn 2 2000 15 Jeff Bagwell / Tony Batista / Barry Bonds / Carlos Delgado / Jim Edmonds / Jason Giambi / Troy Glaus / Ken Griffey / Vladimir Guerrero / Todd Helton / Richard Hidalgo / Alex Rodriguez / Gary Sheffield / Sammy Sosa / Frank Thomas 3 1999 13 Jeff Bagwell / Carlos Delgado / Shawn Green / Ken Griffey / Vladimir Guerrero / Chipper Jones / Mark McGwire / Rafael Palmeiro / Mike Piazza / Manny Ramirez / Alex Rodriguez / Sammy Sosa / Greg Vaughn 4 1998 13 Albert Belle / Jose Canseco / Vinny Castilla / Andres Galarraga / Juan Gonzalez / Ken Griffey / Mark McGwire / Rafael Palmeiro / Manny Ramirez / Alex Rodriguez / Sammy Sosa / Greg Vaughn / Mo Vaughn 5 2001 12 Barry Bonds / Troy Glaus / Luis Gonzalez / Shawn Green / Todd Helton / Phil Nevin / Rafael Palmeiro / Manny Ramirez / Alex Rodriguez / Richie Sexson / Sammy Sosa / Jim Thome 6 2006 11 Carlos Beltran / Lance Berkman / Adam Dunn / Jermaine Dye / Travis Hafner / Ryan Howard / Andruw Jones / David Ortiz / Albert Pujols / Alfonso Soriano / Jim Thome 7 1997 11 Jeff Bagwell / Barry Bonds / Jay Buhner / Vinny Castilla / Andres Galarraga / Juan Gonzalez / Ken Griffey / Tino Martinez / Mike Piazza / Jim Thome / Larry Walker 8 2003 10 Barry Bonds / Carlos Delgado / Jason Giambi / Javy Lopez / Albert Pujols / Alex Rodriguez / Richie Sexson / Sammy Sosa / Frank Thomas / Jim Thome 9 2005 9 Adam Dunn / Andruw Jones / Paul Konerko / Derrek Lee / David Ortiz / Albert Pujols / Manny Ramirez / Alex Rodriguez / Mark Teixeira 10 2004 9 Adrian Beltre / Barry Bonds / Adam Dunn / Jim Edmonds / Paul Konerko / David Ortiz / Albert Pujols / Manny Ramirez / Jim Thome 11 2002 8 Lance Berkman / Barry Bonds / Jason Giambi / Shawn Green / Rafael Palmeiro / Alex Rodriguez / Sammy Sosa / Jim Thome 12 1961 8 Norm Cash / Orlando Cepeda / Rocky Colavito / Jim Gentile / Harmon Killebrew / Mickey Mantle / Roger Maris / Willie Mays 13 1969 7 Hank Aaron / Frank Howard / Reggie Jackson / Harmon Killebrew / Willie McCovey / Rico Petrocelli / Carl Yastrzemski 14 1970 6 Johnny Bench / Frank Howard / Harmon Killebrew / Tony Perez / Billy Williams / Carl Yastrzemski 15 1955 6 Ernie Banks / Ted Kluszewski / Eddie Mathews / Willie Mays / Wally Post / Duke Snider 16 1954 6 Gil Hodges / Ted Kluszewski / Eddie Mathews / Willie Mays / Hank Sauer / Duke Snider 17 1953 6 Roy Campanella / Ted Kluszewski / Eddie Mathews / Al Rosen / Duke Snider / Gus Zernial 18 2009 5 Prince Fielder / Adrian Gonzalez / Ryan Howard / Albert Pujols / Mark Reynolds 19 2007 5 Adam Dunn / Prince Fielder / Ryan Howard / Carlos Pena / Alex Rodriguez 20 1993 5 Barry Bonds / Juan Gonzalez / Ken Griffey / David Justice / Frank Thomas Okay, and what about seasons with the most SS who hit .300 or better?
Rk Year #Matching SS with AVG >= .300 1 1930 7 Dick Bartell / Joe Cronin / Woody English / Charlie Gelbert / Travis Jackson / Red Kress / Glenn Wright 2 2009 6 Erick Aybar / Jason Bartlett / Asdrubal Cabrera / Derek Jeter / Hanley Ramirez / Miguel Tejada 3 2006 6 Rafael Furcal / Carlos Guillen / Derek Jeter / Jose Reyes / Miguel Tejada / Michael Young 4 2007 5 Orlando Cabrera / Derek Jeter / Hanley Ramirez / Edgar Renteria / Michael Young 5 1998 5 Mike Caruso / Nomar Garciaparra / Derek Jeter / Barry Larkin / Alex Rodriguez 6 1941 5 Luke Appling / Joe Cronin / Phil Rizzuto / Cecil Travis / Arky Vaughan 7 1937 5 Luke Appling / Dick Bartell / Joe Cronin / Cecil Travis / Arky Vaughan 8 1926 5 Dave Bancroft / Travis Jackson / Buddy Myer / Joe Sewell / Glenn Wright 9 1922 5 Dave Bancroft / Chick Galloway / Charlie Hollocher / Topper Rigney / Specs Toporczer 10 1901 5 George Davis / Kid Elberfeld / Bill Keister / Freddy Parent / Bobby Wallace 11 2008 4 Cristian Guzman / Derek Jeter / Hanley Ramirez / Ryan Theriot 12 2004 4 Carlos Guillen / Miguel Tejada / Jack Wilson / Michael Young 13 2002 4 Nomar Garciaparra / Edgar Renteria / Alex Rodriguez / Miguel Tejada 14 2001 4 Rich Aurilia / Cristian Guzman / Derek Jeter / Alex Rodriguez 15 2000 4 Deivi Cruz / Nomar Garciaparra / Derek Jeter / Alex Rodriguez 16 1999 4 Nomar Garciaparra / Mark Grudzielanek / Derek Jeter / Omar Vizquel 17 1987 4 Tony Fernandez / Julio Franco / Ozzie Smith / Alan Trammell 18 1938 4 Joe Cronin / Red Kress / Cecil Travis / Arky Vaughan 19 1934 4 Luke Appling / Dick Bartell / Bill Knickerbocker / Arky Vaughan 20 1931 4 Johnny Burnett / Joe Cronin / Woody English / Travis Jackson 21 1929 4 Dick Bartell / Jimmie Dykes / Bernie Friberg / Red Kress 22 1928 4 Mark Koenig / Bobby Reeves / Joe Sewell / Glenn Wright Also, we can't forget about the incredible new arithmetic function, which Andy covered in this post.
And as always, let us know about any bugs you find, any questions you may have, or even suggestions about how to make things even better the next time we update the PI. Happy searching!
Still evaluating the Droid
I bought my Droid last Friday.
And I’m still not sure if I’m going to keep it or return it.
There are a bunch of things I really like about the Droid
-Android 2.0 is a huge improvement over the 1.5
-Verizon Network is awesome.
-Maps is much better on Droid than iPhone
-Exchange sync is great.
-gmail integration is better on droid than on iphone (one click archive, etc)
-I like the FourSquare Android app better than the iPhone app
-improved battery life
-GoogleVoice rocks
Things I don’t like:
-maybe I have a lemon but the battery door is way too loose for my taste.
-There isn’t a Tumblr app for Android
-There isn’t a Yelp app for Android
-There isn’t a flickr app for Android
-The camera is fussy (i understand an update is coming dec 11th that should fix this)
-I’ve tried a bunch of Twitter apps for Android. My favorite so far is an app called ‘Swift’. But it doesn’t hold a candle to Tweetie2 on iPhone
-The music player on the Droid isn’t great. It doesn’t sync with iTunes which is a buzzkill. I’m using DoubleTwist to sync my media and that works out okay.
-I’m getting better with the keyboard but its far from ideal
If I keep the Droid it will most likely mean I’ll end up carrying two devices which isn’t ideal. A number of my friends do this but I never thought i would.
Giving this Droid test run another week.
I’m using aTumble for Tumblr and Twidroid for Twitter. They both seem to work fine.
A Safer Carmine Street? Break Out the Pitchforks!
Plans for a protected bike path on a short stretch of Carmine Street are in jeopardy following a public hearing held by Manhattan Community Board 2's transportation committee last night. The proposal enjoys unanimous support from committee members and has already won approval from both the full CB and the local block association. But the riled-up crowd that commandeered last night's proceedings may have the final word.
The plan would protect the existing bike lane between Seventh Avenue and Sixth Avenue by restoring on-street parking to the south side of Carmine and converting the two-way street to one lane east-bound. The idea first surfaced two years ago, after merchants balked at the removal of parking to make way for the original bike lane. The parking-protected bike lane had since cleared no fewer than three public votes held by CB2 and the Carmine Street Block Association, which represents the merchants.
"Everyone on the transportation committee said very strongly that this will result in a safer, quieter, more pleasant street for pedestrians and bicyclists," said CB2's Ian Dutton. "In the end we said we would write a letter thanking DOT and agreeing with them, but apparently, due to neighborhood hysteria, now is not the time to endorse."
Here's a taste of some of the arguments opponents put forth last night, as recounted by Dutton. The new configuration will make it impossible to execute illegal U-turns on Carmine. The elimination of the west-bound lane will increase traffic flow. Trash bags will slide into the bike lane, making it slippery and dangerous for cyclists.
This last point was scored by a former saxophone shop proprietor who goes by the name "Dr. Rick." Dr. Rick currently runs this website and last night was heard boasting that he's spent 18 hours a day for the past month convincing people of the dangers that will ensue from the Carmine Street plan.
That's what it takes to drum up a crowd loud enough to cow supporters of safer streets. "Apparently there were some people there to speak in favor of the plan, and they were threatened enough that they didn't speak," said Dutton. "The problem is that the people who show up to these meetings are those who are trying to defend their driving. Nevermind the thousands of people who walk across those intersections every day."
DOT now finds itself in the position of deciding whether last night's mob-like display should override three prior public votes and the proven safety benefits of similar street designs. City offices are closed for the holiday and we weren't able to obtain comment from the agency as of this afternoon. Said Dutton: "We realize that this sets a really bad precedent -- a community board asks for a safer street and DOT delivers, and then a few people overturn it."
Takedowns: New Yorkers aren't the only ones...
New Yorkers aren't the only ones who don't like Mr. Chow. In a review of the new Miami branch, the service is likened to McDonald's, the noodles to Chef Boyardee, Green Shrimp are like Green M&M's but not as good, and sides are outrageously overpriced. Bottom line: "Everything about Mr. Chow is awful." [Eater Miami]
Montreal Bagels: St-Viateur vs. Fairmount
"The two bageleries are only a few blocks apart so picking one doesn't usually involve convenience—it's about loyalties."
[Photographs: Erin Zimmer]
Montrealers have a lot of pride in the their bagels. Plus in a French accent, the word just sounds better: bay-gal. Depending on who you ask, "the best" are either from Fairmount or St-Viateur, both of which sell them fresh 24 hours a day. Before touching on the rivalry, let's define the Montreal bagel.
What's All the Fuss?
Compared to the New York-style bagel—a bulbous bread monster—these are smaller, less chewy, and sweeter, thanks to some honey or malt syrup. The bagels are hand-rolled then bathe in sweetened boiling water, and finally roast in a big wood-fired ovens. Because of the erratic flames inside, some come out a golden shade while others are a snowier white. The oven is a huge factor in the awesomeness. Some cities prohibit wood-burning ovens due to fire hazards, but thankfully Montreal has a loosier-goosier policy.
Good luck trying to find an Everything bagel in Montreal. Instead, the most popular flavor is sesame, and they pour on the seeds real good. While both bagelries sell about twenty flavors total (like poppy seed and cinnamon raisin) the sesames make up 70% of sales.
The St-Viateur vs. Fairmount Rivalry
The Fairmount bagel.
The St-Viateur bagels had a little more color variation.
Is there a difference? The Fairmount bagel is just a smidge sweeter. "When you ask people which they prefer, it's about a 60-40 split, Fairmount to St-Viateur," says Montreal food blogger Katerine. But then again, she is a Fairmount fan (which probably has something to do with her sweet tooth). The two bageleries are only a few blocks apart so picking one doesn't usually involve convenience—it's about loyalties.
Which Is "The Original"?
Technically, Fairmount is the original. It opened in 1919, but on St-Viateur Street (this is where it gets all tricky) by a Russian immigrant named Isadore Shlafman. He later moved his bagely to a bigger cottage space on Fairmount Avenue. All of the signage inside Fairmount alludes to this 1919 birth year, even if it was under a different roof, which gives them more of the first-kid-on-the-block street cred.
St-Viateur opened on St-Viateur Street, where it has stayed, in 1957 by an Eastern European immigrant named Myer Lewkowicz who partnered with Jack Shlafman, the son of the Fairmount owner at the time. (Drama!)
Montreal vs. NYC Bagel
What makes our bagels different from everybody else is that they're hand-made. New York, I think 90% of the bagels are machine-made. Toronto, they try to copy off us but still haven't perfected. —Marco Sblano, St-Viateur
This article from a Canadian publication was on St-Viateur's wall o' publicity. Much has been inked about Montreal bagels, and they have pretty tall ceilings, so they cram it all in there.
The Bagel Stages of Life
Bagel offspring.
What starts as a massive sheet of dough gets sliced into a long snake, which gets hand-rolled into many bagel loops. They have bigger holes than the New York version, or at least look bigger due to the smaller size.
Bagel sauna! They get boiled for three minutes.
Then into the oven they go for about twenty minutes.
Weeeee. Bagels roll down the bagel slide. St-Viateur told us they sell about between 700 to 1,000 dozen a day.
Smuggling Them in Luggage Tips
Both places sell the bagels in plastic sleeves (each bag contains six). They can last on their own for six days, in the fridge for ten days, and a few months in the freezer.
I did not report the bagel stowaways in my luggage on my customs forms for fear of them being seized. I tend to lead an honest life but the thought of confiscation pained me too much. Apparently there's a bagel booth at Dorval International Airport right beside the duty-free shop but I took a little walk on the wild side instead. Montreal bagels make you do ka-ray-zee things.
St-Viateur
263 Rue Saint-Viateur Ouest, Montreal QC H2V 1Y1, Canada (map)
514-276-8044Fairmount
74 Avenue Fairmount Ouest, Montreal QC H2T 2M2, Canada (map)
514-272-0667Related
48 Hours in Montreal
Serious Eats Finds New York's Best Bagel
Montreal! Where to eat? [Talk]Note: Last weekend I went to Montreal. Check out more nibbles in my Snapshots from Montreal.
Selective Innovation with Matt Webb
Matt Webb | UX Week 2009 | Adaptive Path from Adaptive Path on Vimeo.
This past UX Week brought some great speakers, including Matt Webb from BERG. We’re happy to share is fantastic talk about developing products and learning from mistakes. Matt shares the lessons that his company grappled with during the design and production of their first major product.
Matt talks about how smart products bring their own design challenges. Internet-connected devices and plastic filled with electronics behave in unexpected ways: what does it means for a physical thing to side-load its behavior, or for a toy to have its own presence in your social network? What we’ve learned about user experience on the Web is a great place to start: social software, adaptation, designing for action creating action — these are principles familiar on the Web, and still valuable when design is not on the screen but in your hands.
Matt’s story is important for anyone who is developing new products and experiences – physical or digital. Being selective about your innovation and looking for the one thing that your customers can get excited about is a guiding product development principle that we can all remember.
The Paranoid Style
There are many ways in which the political moment (hyper-polarizing) and the technological moment (Twitter, instant news cycles) creates a self-perpetuating arms race of hyperbole. On the other hand, some of these new publishing and communications systems do allow us to get a view into where the head of a big chunk of the country is at.
To that end, we've got the story of the Colorado state senator who represents the hyper-conservative Colorado Springs compared Obama to the al Qaeda terrorists who took over Flight 93 on 9/11 and real patriotic Republican Americans to the passengers who had to retake control of the plane.
On the one hand, this is textbook feverish, eliminationist incitement. On the other hand, I think back to how paranoid and in the thrall of their own victimization these folks were a few years when they ran the entire country. So I'm not sure we should be surprised that they go totally crazy when they're largely shut out of power in the country at the national level.
Know Your Meme “Auto-Tune” shoot with “Weird...
Know Your Meme “Auto-Tune” shoot with “Weird Al” Yankovic
Whew! I can FINALLY make these viewable.
Check out the episode here: http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/auto-tune
Grover’s Accidental Gay Marriage PSA
With all the Sesame Street hubbub as of late it seems people (like me) have been watching a TON of old Sesame Street videos. And with all that watching someone over at boingboing came across a great clip of Grover discussing what marriage is. What makes the clip stand out is that nowhere in the clip do Grover and the young boy he’s talking with define marriage as a relationship between a man and a woman. Instead they talk about people loving, hugging, kissing and helping each other.
It is poignant and intelligent and very Sesame Street. And most importantly it gets to the heart of what marriage is--a special relationship you have with another person, not an institution defined by gender.
Ai Intern Receives Singing Chicken Telegram
One of Ai's interns, Adam Picitelli, is celebrating his birthday today. As Ai employees, we get the perk of taking the day off on our respective birthdays, but Adam just loves it here so much he did not want a day off. When Adam came in this morning, however, he had no idea what was in store for him - a singing birthday telegram by a lady in a chicken costume, sent by Adam's sister.
Video courtesy of Ai's Tim Broder
New Video: Raekwon “Catalina”
You never heard me saying that Raekwon and Dr. Dre and Lyfe Jennings weren’t the definition of “exclusive.” And I don’t think anyone would hold such an opinion after watching this video for Only Built 4 Cuba Linx… Pt. II’s “Catalina.” Like Rae says, this is multi-expensive rap here, brother.
Tokyo Tyrant – The Extras Part II : The Performance Wall
Continuing my look at Tokyo Tyrant/Cabinet and addressing some of the concerns I have seen people have brought up this is post #2.
#2. As your data grows does Tokyo Cabinet slow down?
Yes your performance can degrade. One obvious performance decrease with a larger dataset is you start to increase the likelihood that your data no longer fits into memory. This decreases the number of memory operations and trades them for more expensive disk based operations. As fast as any application is, as you read off disk opposed to memory performance is going to drop off substantially. One of the more difficult things to test with Tyrant is disk bound performance. The FS Cache can make Tyrant seem like small amounts of memory will still make it scream. Once your data set is larger then that, people start to claim they hit the performance “wall”.
In order to help test this I went ahead an mounted the FS with my data files with the sync option which effectively disables the FS cache. This should help show the real performance of the hash engine. Here performance dips substantially, as expected :
Look at the IO rate:
NoSync: 31 MB/s
Sync: 3.2 MB/sAs one would expect the IO goes crazy when the drive is mounted with the sync option hitting 99% IO wait. The interesting this here is we are actually bottlenecking on writes and not reads. You see without the FS cache to buffer the writes when we need to remove data from memory we now have to rely on the internal Tyrant cache and when that is exhausted have to then really write to disk not the FS Cache. Now Tyrant starts to take on the same characteristics as your classic DB, the bigger the buffer pool the faster the performance:
Even here the performance drop-off once you exhaust memory is relative. The focus here should be the drop off versus other solutions with the same configuration, not the drop off versus a completely cached version. In this case ask yourself given similar datasets and similar memory requirements what is the performance? Take the above sync test, when I use 256M of memory and run my test with writes going directly to disk I hit 964 TPS, in previous MySQL tests the same setup (256M BP) netted ~160 TPS. So 5x improvement all things being equal. Of course this is a far drop off from the 13K I was getting when everything was effectively in the file system cache or in memory, but 5x is still a very solid improvement.Next up is looking at Tyrant’s and Cabinet’s write bottleneck.
Entry posted by matt | No comment
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Testing Day
I’ve been having problems with this site becoming incredibly slow a few times a day and I have a feeling that the old theme has some code in it that may be the culprit.
I’m putting up a clean temp theme to see if there’s any site slowdowns with it.
A Type Tablet
Typeface: Ziggurat
When Abi Huynh sent me this image, I thought at first that it was a website graphic in the prevailing style: a digital rendering of high-gloss black acrylic, against a reflective white surface, in that "web 2.0" style that will not go away. But no! It’s an actual artifact, and a lovely one at that. Wendy Ellerton designed this limited edition stencil, a lovely laser-cut thingum at A5 size, produced as a promotional gift for the Australian studio Hofstede Design. Front and center here is our Ziggurat typeface, the lone representative of roman capitals to join a great typographic crew: among others, the design features one of the world’s best ampersands (from Caslon), along with sundry other punctuation (you know I love paragraph marks and daggers), and a Fraktur capital S. —JH
How to Make Milk Froth in Your Microwave
The Kitchn shares a neat tip on making milky foaminess for your morning coffee without investing in any fancy contraptions. All you need is a jar and a microwave. Pour the amount of milk you'll want in your coffee into the jar, put the top on, shake it up real good for 30 seconds, remove the lid, microwave this for 30 seconds, and voila. Two-percent milk does the trick or be more indulgent with cream or half-and-half.
Related
Spoof of 'The Raven,' About a Jug of Milk
Starbucks VIA Ready Brew: Instant Coffee That Actually Tastes Like Real Coffee?
Snapshots from Greece: Nescafe Frappe
Know Your Meme: Auto-Tune featuring Professor “Weird Al” Yankovic
The Rocketboom Institute for Internet Studies examines the phenomenon of Auto-Tune with help from special guest Professor “Weird Al” Yankovic! Antares Auto Tune, T-Pain: Can’t Believe It, NPR.org: Auto Tune in Action (audio), Cher: Believe, T-Pain, T-Pain: Chopped and Skrewed, T-Pain: Freeze, Auto-Tune:Why Pop Music Sounds Perfect, Perfect Pitch, Tone Deaf Stars Thrive on Digital Correction Software, T-Pain Builds Power with Digital Prowess, The Arusha Accord, Loftland – Shhh Just Listen, Auto-tune Killed Hip Hop, Singing Kitties, Baby T-Pain, Winston Churchill Backed by Band from Future, AutoTuned, Vimeo: Auto Tuning, Slap Chop Rap, B.O.B Autotune, Carl Sagan - A Glorious Dawn, Auto-tune the News #2, Jay Z’s Death of Auto Tune video, Unintended consequences: Jay-Z’s ‘Death of Auto-Tune’ boosts sales of the software, Music Remix, The Lonely Island: I’m On A Boat (ft. T-Pain). Additional music by The Discoghosts
Tatsumaki is now on CPAN
Tatsuhiko Miyagawa / Tatsumaki-0.1000 - search.cpan.orgTatsumaki, my tiny Perl port of Tornado using Plack and AnyEvent originally started as a proof of concept to test and demonstrate PSGI's streaming interface but its chat app using a simple long-poll Comet got a lot of attentions from people like Audrey (for SocialCalc), Daisuke Maki and gugod.
Actually, by "tiny port" I mean Tatsumaki does most of the things Tornado does, but in a very limited but simple way: simple embedded Perl templates, non-blocking I/O for everything including built-in HTTP clients, long-poll Comet ready MessageQueue API, simple server side push (aka firehose) and Digg's multipart XHR push as a Comet replacement. Yes, it is really simple but exciting :)
I really didn't want to increase the number of modules/applications i maintain but now it has proven very useful when last night I wrote a new PubSubHubbub hub Subfeedr using Tatsumaki, Plack, AnyEvent and Redis in 3 hours: it's a polling PuSH proxy and everything works in the single process in the event loop non-blockingly (so nice).
So anyway, it's now on CPAN as well as on github , which makes it a little harder for me to change APIs and what not, but no worries, everything is undocumented, so you still have to peek at the code to do what you want to do :)
Brain Dump: West Coast Pizza Madness 2009, Where I Visited
View West Coast Pizza Tour in a larger map [All photographs by Adam Kuban unless noted]I know it's taken me a while to get the lead out re this trip. I've been back in NYC for six days after 12 days total on the road (nine actual pizza-eating days among those). I figured that regular Slice readers might want the skinny on which places I visited while out west. They're above in the map, but I'll also list them below, after the jump.
What was I doing on this crazy-ass expedition? Well, Ed and I are working on a project that we'll divulge at later date. My portion of the project involved touring some specific pizzerias on the West Coast as well as Pizzeria Bianco in Phoenix on my way home.
Starting on Saturday October 24 and ending on Saturday, October 30, I went to Portland, Oregon; Seattle; San Francisco; L.A.; and then Phoenix. If you didn't catch the list in my "Margherita Pizzas are Boring" post, here's the basic itinerary:
Portland
After Saturday's pizza stops, I met up with friends for a drink at Mr CB's Lounge, the bar at Country Bill's restaurant in Portland's Woodstock neighborhood. Mr. CB's is total Portland. Red vinyl booths and wood paneling that take you straight back to 1964, which is when this place opened. Think this place is unique? It is and it isn't. It's probably one of the best examples of these stuck-in-amber bars in Portland, but there are lots of others like it. [Photograph: aldenmorgan on Flickr]
10/24 (Saturday)
Ken's Artisan Pizza
Wy'east Pizza10/25 (Sunday)
Escape from New York Pizza
Apizza Scholls
Nostrana
Al Forno FerruzzaSeattle
After an early lunch at Serious Pie, I figured I'd give myself some time to digest while I visited the Space Needle, where i was able to add significantly to my elongated penny collection.
10/26 (Monday)
Serious Pie
Tutta Bella
Via TribunaliSan Francisco Bay Area
I tried to do most of my in-city travel via public transit. This proved to be relatively easy in San Francisco, as I was able to take the BART train out to Oakland and Berkeley (Ashby Avenue station, above) and to the Mission District.
10/27 (Tuesday)
Pizzeria Delfina
Pizzaiolo
Emilia's Pizzeria
Flour + Water10/28 (Wednesday)
A16
Pizzeria PiccoLos Angeles
Oh, boy. Remember how I said I tried to do all in-city travel by public transit. As you can imagine, L.A. threw a wrench in those plans. Big time. I had no idea there were other airports in the city that might be more convenient to my hotel. Ended up taking a very expensive cab ride on arrival. :(
10/29 (Thursday)
Pizzeria Mozza
Pizzeria AnticaPhoenix
Phoenix turned out to be the easiest city to get around by public transit, at least for the purposes of this trip. There's a great new light-rail system that runs from Mesa and Tempe out east into Phoenix and up the city's Central Avenue. You can catch a free shuttle bus from the airport to the 44th Street stop and make your way into town from there. I was staying a block from the line and used it to visit Pane Bianco, Matt's Big Breakfast, and, of course, Pizzeria Bianco, all within easy walking distance of the train. There's even a great blog that explores eating options along the route: PHX Rail Food.
10/30 (Friday)
Pizzeria BiancoKansas City, for a Pizza-free Breather
My parents have been on me about visiting, since I hadn't been back to KC in some time. So I took some time to recuperate at the ol' homestead. No, this isn't the ol' homestead; it's a photo I took while driving around rural Kansas, enjoying the view.
10/31
At this point, I flew to Kansas City, where I visited my family and friends and ate lots of salad, fruits, vegetables, and prunes.Seattle, Part 2
While waiting for Seattle's light-rail train at Westlake Station, I noticed that the mural across the platform had a familiar look to it. Turns out it's by Seattle native Roger Shimomura, a mentor to a friend of mine who studied under Shimomura at the University of Kansas.
11/5 (Thursday)
Delancey: I had goofed on my itinerary the first time around in Seattle and was there on a Monday, one of two days when Delancey is not open. Seeing that I still had some allotted time left in my road trip, I had my trip rerouted back to Jet City and made it to this newcomer when it was actually open.NYC: Home Sweet Home
11/5 to 11/6 (Thursday/Friday)
Red eye home to Newark. You know, Newark is a royal pain in the ass if you're arriving there around 1:30 a.m. There are almost no non-taxi transit options at that hour. I was lucky to have caught the last public bus toward downtown Newark, where I jumped on the PATH to Manhattan. Wow. Downtown Newark is not where you want to be at 2 a.m. with a backpack full of digital equipment.A Unique Trip
I know I sounded a bit whiny and maybe a bit ungrateful in the "Margherita Pizzas Are Boring" post yesterday, but I truly did cherish this trip. Even when visiting what are considered some of the best pizzerias in a given region, you're going to hit some misses along the way. It comes with the territory of expanding your pizza knowledge.
I've still got an awful lot of pizza intel to share with you, and I really wish I could have done it as it happened, but the thing is that I was traveling almost nonstop while on the road. If I wasn't actually sampling pizza, I was on a bus, train, or plane (or on foot or in a Zipcar) to the next destination.
Overall, it was a load of fun, and I'd do it again in a heartbeat. I met up with existing friends in some places and made some new ones along the way (including two couples from Kansas while waiting in line at Bianco). And all the cities I visited were beautiful in their own way — I only wish I had more time to explore each (and eat something there other than pizza). I'll try to wrap this stuff up in the next few days. Oh, and watch for Ed's posts about the places he visited for this project. He'll have stories about Atlanta, Philly, and New Haven for you. All in due time. All in due time.
November 10, 2009
Two YouTube Videos And A Motherfucking Crossfader
OT: Some days, you get Dave Smith Instruments’ Prophet ‘08.
Some days, you get Ableton Live 8.
And some days, you get Two You Tube Videos And A Motherfucking Crossfader, a site that turns your web browser and your favorite YouTube dance tracks a rudimentary DJ setup.
Use the twin search fields to help cue up your next tracks, press play and then start crossfading.
via PranksterDice
"I'm trying to figure out if I can walk away," he said. "I'm the horse pulling the wagon with a lot of people on the wagon, so I'm really not sure. God willing, I'll do next year and then we'll just have to wait and see." via sports.espn.go.com Vin Scully is hands down the best broadcaster in sports. (Chris Collinsworth is probably second). During the NLCS, Vin Scully said that Brad Lidge had gone from "A lights out closer" to a "flickering." It was a perfect analogy, appropriate for casual and serious baseball fans alike.
NaNoWriMo: A Pep Talk and a Warning
Shared by ginevra
awesome.
I honor any project to write something — especially to write a long piece of fiction. It’s something I’ve always wanted to do but, like most people, I have always been too scared to attempt it.
So, kudos.
But, here’s the thing: it’s hard to start writing, and it’s almost as hard to keep writing. Believe me, I know. And, there will be times every day when you get discouraged or you want to throw in the towel because you feel lost or depressed or useless or just plain tired. Empty. That’s the word. Empty.
All I want to say is, keep at it. You can do this.
Every time you sit down to write represents a new chance, and I really encourage you to make yourself see it that way. That means set aside the time (with a beginning and end, if possible), take it seriously, and, most importantly, try not to think. Thinking is not writing; thinking is thinking. Thinking does not make books.
So, keep your hands moving [PDF], don’t self-edit, and above all, don’t let past failures (or successes) have any place at your desk during the time you’ve set aside to do your work. There’s no good that can come out of trying to see the present, creative moment through the overly emotional, shaded lenses of either the past or the future. Just be in the room with yourself and, as my pal Andy says, keep moving the cursor to the right.
And, the warning? Don’t read too many blog posts like this.
The hounds are out this month, guys, and they smell your fear and self-doubt. So, shovelbloggers will be offering you a tantalizing Vegas-style buffet of endless writing “help” that will range from the indispensable to the stupid to the unconscionably poisonous. And, smile though they might, those folks could care less if all those page views end up killing your word count or distracting you at the one delicate moment you were about to figure out your troubled third act. Their job is to make you stop working. Don’t let them. Okay?
Just as thinking is not writing, advice is not writing. Got it? So, don’t blow your day on metajunk.
This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t treat yourself to the best advice about becoming a better writer (see below), but it does mean you sure as shooting better not be reading blog posts about “surprising writing tips” during your Special Writing Time. Personally, I love books about writing, writing advice, and just plain talking about writing. But, I also know (all too well) that something that seems or feels helpful can quickly turn into an anti-pattern. Especially when it does anything to stop that cursor from moving rightward.
Seriously. Read the next sentence out loud to yourself three times. No, do it:
When I’m reading about writing, I’m not writing.
And, of course, the irony is, nearly every (good) book on writing will eventually end up telling you – or leading you to see – the same handful of things.
- Set reasonable goals and honor them
- Draft with complete abandon; edit with surgical precision
- When you sit down to write, focus without distraction; when you’re not writing, keep it off your mind
- Read great books (actual big books, not blogs or magazines) as often as you can
- Just write, and just keep writing, and just keep writing, writing, writing. Then write more.
Good luck with your novel, and have fun. For what it’s worth, here’s a few of my favorite books on writing (alphabetically, by author). Just remember: if you read them during Writing Time, you must smack yourself. Hard.
- Bolker, Writing Your Dissertation in 15 Minutes a Day; Sounds like a BS title, but it’s not. Again: process. How to think and when. How to approach a daunting project sensibly by “parking on a downhill slope.”
- Goldberg, Writing Down the Bones; Shut off your monkey mind, get past discursive thinking, and keep that hand in motion. Like meditation, writing is a practice. You do it because you do it, that is why you do it.
- Hart, A Writer’s Coach; Failures in non-fiction writing are almost always failures of process (especially during pre-writing). A must-buy for journalists (and serious bloggers).
- King, On Writing; Writing is a craft, and it’s difficult, and it matters. If you don’t believe it, get hit by a goddamned van. (N.B.: If you need to pick just one of these, get On Writing. No question. It’s the best.)
- Lamott, Bird By Bird; Just so very, very wonderful. Heartfelt, funny, and desperately useful, if only for learning “The Shitty First Draft.”
- Zinsser, On Writing Well; The Grandaddy of writing-as-craft books. Learn how making prose is like building furniture. You’re an engineer of words. Friend, you’ll close this book with a new obsession for tight and precise prose writing. I don’t pull it off every day (let alone every sentence), but it’s damned sure on my mind all the time.
”NaNoWriMo: A Pep Talk and a Warning” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on November 02, 2009. Except as noted, it's ©2009 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"
Go or Unladen Swallow?
Go is a new programming language to come out of google and this thread on Google discouraging python internally for new projects seems more than just coincidence.
Go is an attempt to combine the ease of programming of an interpreted, dynamically typed language with the efficiency and safety of a statically typed, compiled language.
By combining dynamic features, safety, garbage collection and efficiency in a single language and environment, Go claims to remove the reasons why programmers end up building systems using multiple languages. A brief look at Go shows strong C origins with nice support for "goroutines" - essential sequential processes communicating using channels. I don't quite get the "safety" claim of the language since you can take the address of an uninitialized variable in Go. It could qualify as a "C with concurrency" language I think.
Go already has a great set of packages that should make it immediately usable as a pragmatic language. (The terse package names are very reminiscent of Erlang's package structure.) It even has a package for interfacing with Google Native Client (NaCl) for audio/video access.
(minor edits)
Really, What Can You Say?
From the St. Petersburg Times ...
A Marine reservist armed with a tire iron beat and chased a man he thought was an Arab terrorist and even called 911 to say he was detaining the man, police said.But the man he assaulted was actually a Greek Orthodox priest visiting from overseas who spoke limited English, police said.
...
Instead of offering help, Bruce struck the priest on the head with a tire iron, police said.
Ye Olde long distance ethno-credal identification. Works every time.
Full story here.
Late Update: Oh my .... TPM Reader LM points out that assailant Jasen D. Bruce (or someone with the exact same name who looks an awful lot like him), in addition to bludgeoning Islamic terrorist Greek Orthodox priests, also does some modeling.
winter's chill and the shorter days darken london
I recently visited the Tate Modern's Turbine Hall (probably one of my favorite places in London) to see Miroslaw Balka's How It Is, the massive box of darkness shown in the photo above.The Times Online writes: The experience is sombre, discombobulating and perhaps a bit sinister. But it is beautiful too — and not least when, as your eyes slowly adjust, you begin to discern the infinite subtle shades of grey or turn back to face the entrance and see other visitors vacillating nervously on the brink before, stepping into the engulfing shadows, they are transformed into stalking silhouettes.
Related on this site, the installation that this has been compared to, Olafur Eliasson's The Weather Project from 2004.
Google’s Go: A New Programming Language That’s Python Meets C++
Big news for developers out there: Google has just announced the release of a new, open sourced programming language called Go. The company says that Go is experimental, and that it combines the performance and security benefits associated with using a compiled language like C++ with the speed of a dynamic language like Python. Go’s official mascot is Gordon the gopher, seen here.
Here’s how Google describes Go in its blog post:
Go attempts to combine the development speed of working in a dynamic language like Python with the performance and safety of a compiled language like C or C++. In our experiments with Go to date, typical builds feel instantaneous; even large binaries compile in just a few seconds. And the compiled code runs close to the speed of C. Go is designed to let you move fast.
We’re hoping Go turns out to be a great language for systems programming with support for multi-processing and a fresh and lightweight take on object-oriented design, with some cool features like true closures and reflection.
For more details check out Golang.org.
To get things started the right way, here’s Go’s rendition of Hello World!:
05 package main
07 import fmt “fmt” // Package implementing formatted I/O.
09 func main() {
10 fmt.Printf(”Hello, world; or Καλημέρα κόσμε; or こんにちは 世界n”);
11 }
Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
Sesame Street Gets a Real Street
In celebration of Sesame Street’s 40th Birthday the gang got their own corner in New York City! Now the corner of 64th and Broadway reads 123 Sesame Street and 11/10 is officially Sesame Street Day.
This makes me happy for so many reasons but the main one is that Sesame Street’s new corner is right by my favorite movie theater in New York City, The Walter Reade. This means every time I go see a movie there (they have an awesome Italian Neo-Realist series happening now) that I’ll be able to pass by a piece of my favorite television show of all time.
If you live in New York City check it out when you can and if be sure to catch up on our latest Sesame Street posts:
40 Years of Sesame Street: Happy Birthday!
Honoring Sesame Street at the Daytime Emmy Awards
Top Ten Sesame Street Special Guests
The View Discusses Cookie Monsters New Healthy Eating PSA
Michelle Obama Plants A Garden On Sesame Street (Video)
Mad Men + Sesame Street = Wonderful*photo by Kelly Samardak (Creative Commons)
In Which I Find Margherita Pizzas Boring
A Margherita pie from Tutta Bella in Seattle, adequate but ultimately forgettable. [Photograph: Adam Kuban]
In Which I Summarize This Post
Run-of-the-mill Margherita pies suck. There are great ones, though. Unfortunately, they are few and far between. I now appreciate the addition of well-thought-out and interesting toppings more than ever.
In the Nostrana post I put up on Friday, I said I'd give you my thoughts on VPN pizza. As I wrote that, I had so much more I wanted to say about VPN pizzerias but didn't think stuffing it in the Nostrana entry was appropriate.
So I started to draft a whole blog entry about VPN pizzerias all blurring together. About how they provide a certain level of pizza goodness but never seem all that inspired. About how I had way better Neapolitan-style pizza at places that didn't strive for the VPN label. About how you really had to be on your game if you're taking pizza down to its essence (which I had defined as the pizza Margherita — crust, sauce, cheese).
But then as I reread what I had written, I realized that that's not true just at VPN pizzerias. That's the case for all pizzerias that go for the Neapolitan Margherita thing. If that's your aim, you really have to nail each bit of "the Holy Trinity" if you want to make an AMAZING pizza.
[Photograph: RBerteig on Flickr]
As I touched briefly on in the Nostrana post, if you're doing a Margherita pizza, you've kind of got the deck stacked against you from the beginning. Because, let's face it, fresh mozzarella isn't there so much for the flavor but to add some creaminess and substance to the pie. It's a mild, rather bland cheese, and if you're missing flavor in the crust or sauce, fresh mozzarella ain't gonna pitch in and add much.
So that leaves you with the crust and the sauce doing the heavy lifting.
But at a lot of places, when it comes to sauce, you've got pizza-makers doing little other than crushing some San Marzano tomatoes, adding some salt, and calling that a day. And, hey, you can't really fault that as a technique. Good San Marzano (or San Marzano–style) tomatoes, whether fresh or canned (and in the U.S., they're almost always coming from a can), aren't anything to sneeze at. The best sauces made this way will be redolent of fresh tomato, with just a little pleasant sweetness.
The pizza upskirt from Pizzeria Mozza, a place where the crust is flavorful, crisp, and chewy. [Photograph: Adam Kuban]
Maybe you can see what I'm getting at here. If you accept that the cheese is going to be mild-flavored (or, at worst, bland) and that the sauce will vary little from place to place, that leaves you only with the crust to differentiate one Neapolitan Margherita pizza from another. It's no surprise, then, that the pies that topped my list were those whose pizza-makers came from a background in bread or who were doing something beyond the boundaries (either association- or self-imposed) of traditional Neapolitan pizza.
A Pizza Spectrum
Here is a sort of continuum of pizza styles/philosophies among the places I visited this trip—in descending order, from strict constructionists at top to more liberal interpreters of the form. (Incidentally, this is also a list of the 19 different pizzerias I visited over the course of nine days.)
VPN Pizzerias
Tutta Bella
Via Tribunali
A16
Pizzeria AnticaNon-VPN Naples-Style
Nostrana*
Pizzaiolo
Flour + Water
Pizzeria PiccoNeapolitan-Inspired
Ken's Artisan Pizza
Pizzeria Delfina
Pizzeria Mozza
Pizzeria Bianco
DelanceyNeapolitan-American
Wy'east Pizza
Escape from New York Pizza
Al Forno Ferruza
Apizza Scholls
Emilia's PizzeriaDoin' Their Own Thing
Serious PieBy the time I got to the Los Angeles leg of my West Coast pizza journey, I found the flavor of many of these trad-Neapolitan pies blurring into one another—with some exceptions. And this might be the biggest heresy you'll see me write: By the time I got to the end of my journey, I was seriously questioning the deliciousness of Neapolitan Margherita pies in general.
Wait, I'm not going to hedge: Margherita pizzas are just plain ol' boring.
When I voiced this sentiment in the Slice–Serious Eats office yesterday morning, my colleage Carey Jones's jaw dropped.
"What? How can you say that? The Margherita pizza is my favorite form of pizza. Don't you want to wait for a week or two while you detox before you make that statement?"
OK. Maybe I'll go back to hedging. Mediocre Margherita pizzas are just plain' old boring. And, unfortunately, there's a lot of them out there. I did eat some great Margherita pies on the trip, but they were few and far between. And the best pizza I ate on the trip, the pizzas I'm still thinking about and craving now, five days after returning, are either decidedly non-Naples-style pizzas or those that are Neapolitan-inspired but that take the form in a new direction.
About midway through the trip, as I talked to Girl Slice on the phone, I said as much: "You know, these Margheritas are all at a certain level of goodness, but most of them lack something great. After eating your way through so many of them, you really come to appreciate it when you find pizza with a point of view."
"OMG, 'pizza with a point of view'?" she replied. "That was the most obnoxious foodie statement ever."
Whatevs. I still say it's true.
The Big Picture
A Margherita pizza from Ken's Artisan Pizza — one of the awesome, NOT-boring Margherita pies I sampled.
In order to get a handle on all I'd eaten and try to sort through the data points collected, I broke up the various pizzerias into a sort of spectrum (sidebar at right).
Once I did that, I noticed that the places that really made an impression on me started to register by the time I got to the "Non-VPN Naples-Style Pizzeria" places. And the places I'm still dreaming of are all in the "Naples-inspired" or the "Neapolitan-American" headings.
The best pizzas I had were from people who were unconcerned with meeting someone else's standard or even a perceived traditional-Neapolitan standard and who took their pies in different directions, whether they were Neapolitan-inspired or doin' their own thing.
When it comes down to it, it seems that many of the Neapolitan-traditionalists can't see the forest for the cheese.
My Conversion to Toppings
Pizzeria Bianco's Rosa pizza, topped with red onion, Parmigiano-reggiano, rosemary, and Arizona pistachios, is probably the best pizza I've ever eaten in my life. [Photograph: Robyn Lee]
In the past, I've always maintained that a Margherita pizza (in the case of a Neapolitan-style joint) or a plain slice or pie (in non-Neapolitan cases) should serve as a benchmark when considering a pizza or comparing one pizzeria to another of similar bent. I still believe that. If a pizzeria can't do a simple pie right, its other offerings won't be all that they can be.
But great toppings in interesting combinations are a godsend for otherwise so-so pies and make great ones ridiculously awesome. Yeah, an obvious statement, right? But for some reason, I used to stubbornly avoid toppings (except for my beloved sausage-and-onion combo). After some eye-opening pizza concoctions, though, I'm now a full-on topping nut. (Well, maybe not full-on — I'm not going to go for overloaded pies.) Creations like the sausage-and-cherry-bomb-pepper pie at Serious Pie (Seattle), the clam pie at Delancey (also in Seattle), the brussels sprouts-and-pancetta pizza at Motorino (NYC), and the Rosa at Phoenix's Pizzeria Bianco (red onion, Parmigiano-reggiano, rosemary, pistachios) are revelatory. I'm now rarin' to explore the world of toppings in more detail than I ever have before.
OK. Enough with this aside. I'll be back later tonight with the last of the Portland pizzerias I visited, and then I can finally blab about Seattle, the place where a crazy homeless man offered to sell me crack after I gave him some leftover pizza.
*I initially identified this place as a VPN pizzeria, based on a small VPN placard I had seen displayed above the bar, but it is not listed on the VPN Americas site nor on the Italian VPN parent site.
Random Pairings
I have to say I don't read Vogue Deutsch monthly. And by read, I mean look at the photos because my foreign language skills are embarrassingly non-existent. But now I'm kind of thinking I may need to start, if only to see the weird, random casting decisions they make for shoots.
This month brings you Lost's Hurley (Jorge Garcia) and Christie Brinkley, shot by Bruce Weber in Montauk.
Also spotted: tortilla chips, fried chicken, and a Pilates machine. Oh, and some oddly loving glances between two people we never thought we'd see in a picture together. (Not to imply anything at all, it's really just odd.)
See for yourself after the jump.
Macaron Glacé = Ice Cream Sandwich with Macarons and Gelato
Note: Last weekend I went to Montreal. Check out more nibbles from my Snapshots from Montreal.
A macaron glacé with strawberry gelato. [Photographs: Erin Zimmer]
In the ice cream sandwich world, the macaron glacé might be the queen of them all. Instead of the long chocolate, tiny hole-filled cookies smashing generic vanilla ice cream, these are made with delicate French macarons as bookends and really good gelato inside.
It's hard to find them outside of France. This one was from Point G in Montreal, probably the best ice cream source in the city. Some people blab about Le Bilboquet but my Montreal food blogger pal Katerine insists that Point G is where it's at. "Le Bilboquet is fine—like Häagen-Dazs fine. Sure, it totally hits the spot, but why have Häagen-Dazs when you can have this?" And more importantly, why have just that when you can have it multiplied by macarons?
On the right side of the shop they have a bunch of colorful macarons in flavors galore: pear-ginger, caramel, pistachio, lavender-blueberry, citrus, chocolate-coconut, grapefruit, chocolate-hazelnut, creme brulee, chocolate-passionfruit, maple, dark chocolate, and more.
Unfortunately for the macaron glacé, where the macaron cookie part is about five times as big, it just comes in one big bright color and almond flavor.
Over on the left side, the glass case is full of gelato flavors like maple, mojito, rum-raisin, and strawberry. But most eye-catching is that foie gras hiding in the back corner. It's not super creamy—more dry and icy, and considering how rich duck livers are, it's surprisingly kind of refreshing.
The mini gelato shovel sample was plenty for me, though Point G sells it by the jar for $25. They recommend spreading it on baguette (not scooping it into a macaron glace).
Co-owner Thierry Andrieu, who runs the place with fellow pastry chef Julien Reignier, is usually around smiling. You gotta love his little hot pink tuft of hair (which matches his coat, the walls, and the framboise macarons).
How exactly do you eat a macaron glacé? It's kind of like a multi-layered cheeseburger. You start rotating your head, calculating the perfect entry point. But you really just have to go for it, like Katerine is doing here.
Point G
1266, ave. Du Mont-Royal E, Montreal Québec, H2J 1Y3 (map)
514-750-7515Related
Introduction to French Macarons
Ketchup Macarons, a Savory French/American Snack
Mitzy's Macarons From New Jersey: The Best Macarons Outside of Paris
Okay, now I get it. Her entire career is one continuous riff on...
Okay, now I get it. Her entire career is one continuous riff on Rocky Horror.
the case for twitter ads
David Hornik makes a compelling* argument for Twitter to bring on the ads. Esp. of note is the graf about context...
The very data others have suggested Twitter should sell to third parties is invaluable to create the necessary context for a successful advertising model. Not only will Twitter know the things about which any given user is tweeting, it will also know who that user is following and the things about which they are tweeting. That's a huge amount of context for advertisers. I'm guessing Toyota would love to advertise to an individual who tweets about shopping for a new Honda Hybrid.Worth reading in full.
* I'm required to say that about any post from a board member of my employer. Have you seen the great LinkedIn / Twitter integration, BTW?
Gaga Nails It
The interwebs are all abuzz today with the release of Lady Gaga's new video for "Bad Romance." She's the ultimate crossover as every music, celeb, and fashion site is fairly obsessed with its arrival.
As expected the styling is ridiculously awesome. The S/S10 McQueen is killer (as is the Lady's ability to walk in those shoes.) And its totally creepy and gorgeous all at the same time. I've already watched it three times and can't imagine getting sick of it anytime soon.
In honor of Gaga's new gig as a beauty spokesperson, I'll point you to my favorite non-clothing related styling choice in the video: the barbed wire-like nails. While they're not exactly practical for every day life, you (or rather your manicurist) could create something nifty like this for a holiday party.
P.S. How weirdly cartoon-y were they able to make her eyes in some of those shots? I felt like I was watching Roger Rabbit!
Everything old is new again: Facebook and AOL
Steve Rubel: Five Incredibly Useful Things You Can Do Without Ever Leaving Facebook. "I am discovering that it's becoming a one-stop shop for many of my day-to-day activities," he writes.
The post strikes me as a retrograde observation. Not because Steve Rubel is any kind of Luddite, but because the online industry has, for more than 20 years, been trying to create a one-size-fits-all website. It still is. Indeed, it seems every big site aims to recapture the glory days of America Online.
In the 1980s, Compuserve and Prodigy and the like created online dialup communities. The winner in this space, of course, was AOL, which dominated for years. It became a destination for users and businesses alike. Every company in America needed an AOL presence and someone who could code in Rainman.
As the web's ubiquity overtook AOL, websites began cropping up that attempted to reinvent the paradigm by ... emulating AOL. Yahoo and MSN (and many smaller peers) created integrated online presences where features and options abounded and stickiness became the prime measurement.
Then search came to prominence and splintered people's site use. Google's success as an ad platform allowed Google Labs to create dozens of experimental services, all of which served to make Google more of a catch-all, and more like ... the old, closed-wall AOL, just with outbound links.
Which brings us to 2009, where Facebook has captured the exact same mindspace as, yep, AOL. What makes Facebook interesting these days? Basically the same things that made AOL a star a decade earlier.
And here we are again, with consumers converging on a single site and companies clamoring to capture their attention.
- private messaging without an external email client: just like AOL!
- live chat: just like AOL!
- integrated games and shopping: just like AOL!
- every company feels a need to be there: just like AOL!
AOL was eventually done in by a lack of openness and charging for options that were free elsewhere. So far, Facebook has avoided those mistakes. It will be interesting to see what social and economic forces drive its future--and whether it ultimately becomes something other than The Next AOL.
SuperFreakonomics not so super
In a New Yorker book review this week, Elizabeth Kolbert tears Levitt and Dubner a new one over the geoengineering chapter of SuperFreakonomics, calling the pair's thinking on the issue "horseshit".
Tags: books economics Elizabeth Kolbert global warming science Stephen Dubner Steven Levitt SuperFreakonomicsGiven their emphasis on cold, hard numbers, it's noteworthy that Levitt and Dubner ignore what are, by now, whole libraries' worth of data on global warming. Indeed, just about everything they have to say on the topic is, factually speaking, wrong. Among the many matters they misrepresent are: the significance of carbon emissions as a climate-forcing agent, the mechanics of climate modelling, the temperature record of the past decade, and the climate history of the past several hundred thousand years.
Shakira's Honest Hips Made Their Way to the Bowery Hotel Last Night
Last night, I crossed off one of my dreams on my gay bucket list when I interviewed Shakira at the Bowery Hotel, celebrating both her She Wolf album release and Rolling Stone magazine cover. All hell broke loose when the cute as a button pint-sized songstress who rocked Bo Derek-like dreads and a sparkly black blazer arrived on the red carpet. (I blame her tiny figure and the flashing lights for me asking out loud "is that Miley Cyrus?") I've thought Shakira was the coolest of them all since her brilliant "coffee machine in an office" lyric and being a Crystal Castles fan, but now she's straight up bad ass... She told me her fave Rolling Stone magazine cover of all time was none other than Kurt Cobain, before pointing to her own. Shakira also said she's YouTubing Taylor Swift's dead-on impersonation of her on SNL ASAP (she finds Ms. Swift "so sweet and talented") and keeps those hips in pop star form by watching what she eats and exercising. "But I LOVE food. I haven't exercised in four days because I've had no time."
Alexandra Richards pumped the jams (and told me her nickname is Wolfy), bite-sized treats were served (my dinner) and a PATRON (!) open bar made it quite an evening -- I saw several hips that weren't lying, but were definitely a bit wobbly... but that's Patron for you. According to the She Wolf of the hour, her hips NEVER lie. "They're the frankest, most honest hips you'll ever find." Aah-woo!
Photos via celebrity-gossip.net
Nominate America's Best Party!
When it comes to nightlife-related pursuits, we are not as New York-centric as you might assume. We like to shake it in Savannah, boogie in Boston and party till we puke in Pittsburgh. Really! Which is why we are seeking out nominees for America's Best Party to be voted on by you dear readers and announced live at our Fifth Annual Nightlife Awards on December 9, 2009!
Nominate your favorite regularly-occurring party night by emailing said party to vip@papermag.com with the subject line: "America's Best Party." Easy peasy.
And then check back soon on PAPERMAG.com, where we'll be announcing the nominees and you can start voting!
Drupal wins best open source PHP CMS for second year in a row
Drupal has won best open source PHP Content Management System for the second year in a row in the Packt Publishing 2009 Open Source CMS Awards. Drupal won by popular vote and a critical selection by a panel of judges. This award reflects the strong support of the Drupal community and our focus on quality which leads to critical acclaim and rapid adoption for large, high quality projects. Drupal won best overall open source CMS in 2007 and 2008.
From the award announcement,
We are pleased to announce that Drupal has won the Best Open Source PHP CMS Category in the 2009 Open Source CMS Award. This category featured a very close contest between the top three, Drupal, WordPress, and Joomla! in which Drupal ended up as the overall choice for the judges and the public.While Drupal and Joomla! have always consistently featured among the top three in this category, WordPress made its way into the top five for the first time. The fact that it was outranked by Drupal by a very slight margin indicates how popular it has become with users as well as developers over the past year.
Cloud of Atlases by The Editors
via www.themorningnews.org "If you’ve ever picked up an old globe in a thrift store, you already know the sport of trying to determine its age based on where certain borders are demarcated and how territories are designated. And if testing your combined knowledge of history, culture, and cartography sounds like your kind of fun (it’s our kind of fun), you may enjoy what we’ve got in store. We’ve removed the legends and all other telltale labels from the maps below, and challenge you to guess what each map depicts using only clues contained within the maps: the color-coding, names, landmarks, and whatever else you can detect. Here’s one clue to get you started: None of the maps represent gross national anything." Excellent.
Video: Cookie Monster on the Origin of 'Om Nom Nom Nom Nom' and How to Eat a Cookie
In honor of Sesame Street's 40th anniversary, Ella Morton of Rocketboom chats with Cookie Monster to talk about his diet, the origin of om nom nom nom nom, and his cookie-eating method. Video, after the jump.
Cookie Monster on the Origin of 'Om Nom Nom Nom Nom' and How to Eat a Cookie
If you are unfamiliar with the awesomeness of "om nom"-img, refer to omnomnomnom.com. [via Buzzfeed]
Related
Introducing the Serious Eats New York Chocolate Chip Cookie Championships
In Videos: NPR Interview with Cookie Monster
Crazy Craigslist Cookie Ad
In Videos: Cookie Monster on 'The Colbert Report'
Maps without labels quiz
From The Morning News, a collection of maps without labels or legend...can you guess what each map represents?
Tags: maps
Black Elves
Also, am I the only African-American gamer who makes his toons look as black as possible? It's the weirdest thing. My younger brother takes this to laughable extremes--in WoW he made his tauren druid as dark as he could. Even on my blood elf pally, I made sure he had a tan. Still got the shock of red hair though. I need that.
A WiFi wonderland in the sky... and on the ground!
The holiday season is always about connecting with friends, family... and the web. During the holidays in particular, the web brings us closer to others through the email we send, YouTube videos we share, gifts we buy, holiday music we listen to and charitable donations we make. That's why a few weeks ago, Google announced that we're working with Virgin America to give free WiFi to all passengers on Virgin flights this holiday season.
If you're one of the millions of people who will be flying during this busy travel period, chances are you may spend more time in the airport than on the plane itself. So, starting today and lasting through January 15th, we're happy to announce that we will be offering free WiFi in 47 airports across the country. You can see the full list of airports here. This is one of our holiday gifts to our users, and, when you connect, we also hope that you'll take the opportunity to try some of the latest Google products. Our hope is that being connected for a few extra minutes (or hours, if you're delayed!) will help make things a bit easier. Be sure to look for the Google signs in an airport near you.
Here's to the beginning of a happy, healthy holiday season!
Posted by Marissa Mayer, VP Search Products & User Experience
Blogs in 1998
tawawa.org has done some research into early blogs, making the argument that attributing the sources for links was the spark that ignited the blogging phenomenon:
The blogosphere arose on 24 April 1998. On that day Steve Bogart made the announcement that he was adopting Jorn Barger’s recent practice of attributing the source of the links he was posting to his weblog. Barger’s innovation of crediting the origin of his outbound pointers, adopted by Bogart first and by many others afterwards, infused an earlier, mostly dormant network with a dynamic it had previously lacked, turning the aspiration of a self-aware social medium into the reality of such a medium.
I’m very glad all of the old blog content is archived so that this sort of analysis can be performed. Both Jorn and Steve are still at it, on blogs and on Twitter.
A Single Man trailer
The trailer for Tom Ford's directorial debut, A Single Man, is gorgeous. No talking, just a simple ticking clock and images.
Reminds me of the trailer for A Clockwork Orange, only slower. Movie looks great too. (via fimoculous)
Tags: A Single Man clockworkorange movies Tom Ford trailers
#1312625
Today, my friend explained to me that if you write 3.14 on a piece of paper and hold it in a mirror, it will say pie. Mind. Blown. MLIA
The Internet as Playground and Factory
Our NYC readers might be interested in this conference coming up this week:
The Internet as Playground and Factory: A Conference on Digital Labor
Thursday, November 12, through Saturday, November 14, 2009
The New School, 66 Fifth Avenue at 12th Street, New York City
veralistcenter.org | digitallabor.orgThis conference confronts the urgent need to interrogate the concepts of labor and value in the digital economy and seeks to inspire proposals for action. There are currently few adequate definitions of labor that fit the complex, hybrid realities of the digital economy. The Internet as Playground and Factory poses a series of questions about the conundrums surrounding labor (and often the labor of love) in relation to our digital present. It is the first in a series of biennial conferences titled The Politics of Digital Media.
Participants include Mark Andrejevic, Burak Arikan, Adam Arvidsson, Ayhan Aytes, Banu Bargu, Chris Barr, Michel Bauwens, Jonathan Beller, Fred Benenson, Jonah Brucker-Cohen, Ted Byfield, Paolo Carpignano, Sumita Chakravarty, Heather Chaplin, Mark Coté, Brittany Anne Chozinski, Patricia Ticineto Clough, Gabriella Coleman, Geoff Cox, Jeff Crouse, Amanda McDonald Crowley, Sean Cubitt, Jodi Dean, Laura E. DeNardis, DJ N-RON, Jesse Drew, Catherine Driscoll, Kate Eichhorn, Niva Elkin-Koren, Lauren Ellsworth, Ursula Endlicher, Laura Forlano, Christian Fuchs, Francesco Gagliardi, Alexander Galloway, Michael H. Goldhaber, David Golumbia, Ellen Goodman, Melissa Gregg, James Grimmelman, Alex Halavais, Orit Halpern, Paul Hartzog, Joseph Heathcott, Brian Holmes, Lilly Irani, Carolyn Lee Kane, Pat Kane, M. Christopher Kelty, Scott Kildall and Victoria Scott, Abigail De Kosnik, Julian Kücklich, Ferentz Lafargue, Mark Larrimore, Deborah Levitt, Laura Liu, Thomas Malaby, Edward Maloney, Meredith L. McGill, Christina McPhee, Ulises Mejias, Robert Mitchell, Nick Montfort, Lisa Nakamura, Gina Neff, Luis Vincent Nunez, Timothy Pachirat, Frank Pasquale, Christiane Paul, Ben Peters, Dominic Pettman, Hector Postigo, Howard Rheingold, Alex Rivera, Martin Roberts, Judith Rodenbeck, Kenneth Rogers, Ned Rossiter, Stephanie Rothenberg, Douglas Rushkoff, Ivan Sigal, Brooke Singer, Hendrick Speck, Julia Sonnevend, Elizabeth Stark, Yuri Takhteyev, Fred Turner, McKenzie Wark, Darren Wershler, and Jonathan L. Zittrain.The conference was preceded by a panel on September 29 entitled Changing Labor Value that featured Andrew Ross, Tiziana Terranova and McKenzie Wark and presented as annotations in space Web-based art projects by Burak Arikan, Ursula Endlicher, Scott Kildall and Victoria Scott, Aaron Koblin, and Stephanie Rothenberg and Jeff Crouse.
The conference is sponsored by Eugene Lang College The New School for Liberal Arts and presented in cooperation with the Center for Transformative Media at Parsons The New School for Design and the Vera List Center for Art and Politics on occasion of the center's 2009/2010 program cycle "Speculating on Change."
Image: Stephanie Rothenberg and Jeff Crouse, Invisible Threads/Double Happiness Jeans (2008).
Untangling brand and customer experience, in 10 minutes or less
Does the brand define the customer experience, or is the customer experience the brand? Your work may involve both, but you probably attack problems with a bias for one or the other.
Earlier this year I asked Josh Levine of Great Monday to simply describe the relationship between brand and experience, and I like the balanced answer he drew:
However, I had to go back and dig deeper with Josh to clear up the differences between his diagram and the way I often see the relationships between brand and experience being practiced. What emerged was this illustrated question and answer, attempting to untangle brand and customer experience in just 9 minutes:
November 9, 2009
I/O bound HTTP clients in web frameworks
If the server environment supports it the client will automatically run asynchronous and allow the server to handle more requests while waiting for the client. In environments such as CGI and FastCGI the client will simply fallback to blocking until it is finished. Multiple client requests will always be handled parallel though and never block each other.Congrats sri on his progress on Mojo project. I'm really glad my Tatsumaki framework still has a relevant competitor :)
Here's the code to do that non-blocking proxy request in his blog post, as a web handler in Tatsumaki.
It's built on top of Plack and AnyEvent, so it handles multiple requests in parallel non-blockingly and you can use whatever Plack middleware components and AnyEvent aware modules to do non-blocking work, and Tatsumaki also falls back to the blocking mode in Apache, FastCGI and CGI if it makes sense.
You can see more examples of doing I/O bound response, server push (streaming or Multipart XHR) and Comet long-poll in Tatsumaki's eg/ directory.
Twitter's new Trends API will use Yahoo's WOE for locations
also used by Flickr, this cements the CC-licensed WOE data as the web's placename database [via]
Happy 40th birthday Sesame Street!
It's hard to believe, but today marks the 40th anniversary of Sesame Street! Over the past four decades, Sesame Street has been entertaining and educating children all across the world. To pay tribute to the colorful cast of characters, we've been delighted to feature some of your favorites on the Google homepage during the past week. With this effort, we're honored to help support Sesame Workshop, the non-profit organization behind Sesame Street. It's always great to see the spotlight on children's education, and we hope you enjoyed the homepage doodles as much as we did.
And, we have an exciting birthday surprise — for this very special celebration, we're happy to share a high-resolution gallery that includes all of the Sesame Street doodles for you to download. Almost as fun as the doodles themselves, there's even a sneak peak into the photo shoot that yielded today's doodle. As an added bonus, you'll also find a few extra characters that spent some time in other countries.
From Oscar to Elmo, the whole gang had a ton of fun hanging out with Google this week. So, enjoy the full series again, change your desktop background, hang them around your desk, and join us in celebrating Sesame Street!
Posted by Marissa Mayer, VP Search Products & User Experience
Happy Birthday! Scouting NY is 1 Year Old!
Ha, just realized that Sunday marked the year anniversary of Scouting NY! At some point, I was planning on making a bigger post of this, but then I completely forgot. Hopefully, over the past year, we’ve given you a look (or at least a glimpse!) of a side of New York you never knew existed. 180 posts to date, many more to come!
As always, thanks for reading!! And remember: the tourists are not stupid for looking up (though they could try to keep walking while they’re doing it).
-SCOUT
PS – A bit I still find funny from the very first post:
“I forget what street I was walking on, but I passed a window with this sign beside it:
“Sort of depressing that the blinds are now pulled and there are bars over the windows.”
oh i'm sorry, were we talking about your weekend?
Mena pointed me to Style Rookie ("Tiny 13 year old dork that sits inside all day wearing awkward jackets and pretty hats") and now I Can't Stop Reading. I'll do this this one time to get it out of my system and avoid reblogging every new thing she posts; here's the intro to her latest*...
Hi! How are you? How was your weekend? What did you do? What'd you think of TaySwift on SNL? What'd you think of some sports event that took place these past couple days? How's your cat? How's your dog? How's your husband? The newborn? OH UH HUH GOOD STORY GUESS WHAT
"Subscribed" is too weak a word.
* Yes, that's 7 "meh"s in the title of the post. See what I mean?
Nine Months!
We went back to Sears for more portraits of 9-month-old Louis Benjamin. Enjoy!
The best part about getting the images on disk is that they give you all the outtakes, too!
And, evidently, if you juxtapose a cute one with a bunch of goofy ones, it's called a "personality collage"!
Zoltan Indicators
Grant McCracken suggests that Mechanical Turk be used to track leading cultural indicators: "My assumption is that real innovation is always a shocking, hard to think and therefore disagreeable. This is because we don't yet have a form in our head for it. It comes to us as noise."
WordCamp NYC 2009
WordCamp NYC will be held this weekend, November 14th and 15th. It’s a great get together for the New York, and the extended, community of WordPress-loving bloggers and developers:
With an amazing lineup of speakers, over 525 people already registered, and 8 session tracks – there is something for everyone.
Myself and several colleagues from Automattic are flying in for this event, and I’m personally excited to see the track devoted to CMS use featuring case studies of current publishers.
If you haven’t signed up yet, it’s $45 for both days, or just $25 for Sunday. More details available on 2009.newyork.wordcamp.org.
[ Visit WordCamp NYC 2009 and WordCamp.org for other WordCamps happening all over the world ]
John Carmack: Working with Apple not always easy
Filed under: Apple Corporate, Gaming, Software, Apple History
Folklore.org is a tremendous repository of Apple history and lore. Check it out if you haven't; you'll find some entertaining and incredible stories.
I'm reminded of Folklore whenever a story emerges describing Apple from behind the scenes, like this interview with id Software's co-founder John Carmack. Speaking with Kotaku, John describes the ups and downs of working with Apple:
"I'll be invited up on stage for a keynote one month and then I'll say something they don't like and I can be blacklisted for six months."
We suspect such a public revelation won't get you back on stage anytime soon, John. Or maybe not, as he's now got "a man on the inside." Former id coworker Graeme Devine now works at Apple's iPhone Game Technologies division. However, the most interesting part of this interview confirms, in a small way, what I've always suspected: Apple begrudgingly promotes the iPod touch and iPhone as gaming platforms.
"At the highest level of Apple, in their heart of hearts," Carmack said, "they're not proud of the iPhone being a game machine, they wish it was something else." I have no way of backing this up, but I've long suspected that Steve Jobs in particular has no interest in the world of gaming. They're certainly pushing the iPod touch as a gaming device, but I'm sure it's through tightly-clenched teeth.TUAWJohn Carmack: Working with Apple not always easy originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Mon, 09 Nov 2009 16:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Stage Notes: Kiss Me on the Mouth
This romantic comedy by first-time produced playwright Melanie Angelina Maras, is about a set of best friends, Christina and Amy. Christina is a party girl, who enjoys her cocktails and wouldn't mind finding a man to take care of her every need. Amy is shy and unsuccessful with men, and is even thinking of joining a convent. Kiss Me on the Mouth is directed by Stephen Adly Guirgis, who has been a member of the well-respected LAByrinth Theater since 1994, and is the author of some of their early, most successfully realized plays, In Arabia, We'd All Be Kings and Jesus Hopped the "A" Train. Guirgis was also an actor and he and the playwright met in a workshop where he was mentoring other actors who were beginning to write play scripts. I spoke with the up-and-coming playwright.
That's a provocative title, Melanie. How did you come up with it?
At first I called it The Consumption, but my director said, "You've got to change the title." I was in a movie theater and it just came to me. The reason for the title is that the play is really about loneliness, a really specific, New York kind of loneliness. It's about all the things that we do and say so that we can feel a little less lonely.
OK, so how does the title fit?
In the play, every character is seeking intimacy in some way, and really, the first way you enter another person's body is through the mouth. It's a portal of intimacy, of some kind.
Tell me about the plot.
It's about two best friends, Christina and Amy. They both meet these guys who could be "the one." It's about the very different journeys they take. One guy is an artist, a total introvert, like a hermit crab. And the other is the personification of an extrovert, a walking id, a total hedonist.
I'm not going to ask you who ends up with whom.
Let's leave it up to the play. I don't want to give too much away. I will say that everyone who sees the show will relate to it in some way.
Tell me a little about the scenes. Do we ever have all four of the characters together?
The scenes are pretty intimate. We don't ever see more than three people on stage at once. It's very much about how the relationship as friends is tested, and whether they are going to make it through.
I'm a big fan of Guirgis as a playwright, but I don't know his work as a director yet. Tell me a little about this collaboration.
I wrote the play from a place of great loneliness. In the beginning it was all monologues, and all questions, and then as I started to think of it as real stories, with real characters and real circumstances, those questions were kind of still there. I asked my director, and other men, "What's the answer here? Tell me what a man wants, what a man thinks." And my director gave me a great response. He said to me, "It's not about what I want, or what I think, or what any man thinks or wants. It's about what you want." So the answer is what I imagine, that is what the play is about.
Center Stage, 48 W. 21st St., (212) 352-3101. Nov.5-21. Mon., Wed. & Sat., 8 p.m. $18.
Fashionably Conscious: Shoes for the Cure
Last year, Converse launched their ambitious 1HUND(RED) Artists Chuck Taylor All Star series -- a year-long fund-raising partnership with the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, in which 100 artists were commissioned to offer their takes on Converse's classic high-top. Though the line concluded earlier this year, a clean version of the Chuck Taylor high-top designed by United Bamboo's Thuy Pham is hitting stores now. Recognized for his distinctive take on American prep, Pham re-designed the shoe in a round-quilted pattern, with a simple, red stripe adding a little urban flair. The United Bamboo Converse model is available in white nylon, and leather versions retail for $100. A percentage of the net wholesale price of the shoe will help fight AIDS through programs that emphasize women and children's health in Swaziland, Rwanda, Ghana and Lesotho. Since its launch in 2006, (RED) partners, including Gap and Emporio Armani, and Global Fund worldwide have raised over $100 million.
King of the Little Things 2009
We’re happy to announce the addition of the newest member of our team. Matt brings his particular style to the site beginning today.
I’m the new guy. Six or seven of you may have previously read my work elsewhere under a different name. I won’t tell you what it was, but it was something like… “devil_f.” No, that’s too obvious; let’s go with “d_fingers.”
We often hear that certain hitters “just do the little things” to help their team win. Can these things be quantified? Some would say no, but in last offseason’s epic Confused Says What? thread with Tom Tango, a user suggested that if one subtracted traditional linear weights (wRAA) from game-state linear weights (WPA/LI), one would get a measure of the “Little Things” the player contributed to his team(s) during the year. And so I checked it out.
What exactly does that mean? Briefly, while wRAA is decontextualized linear weights runs above/below average, WPA/LI takes into account how much a player helped his team win in context. While RE24 (with which we could do a similar post) goes further and takes the base/out state into account, WPA/LI also takes the game state (the score and the inning) into account. In nuce: for WPA/LI, in the bottom of the ninth with the bases loaded, a walk and a home run have the same value, while for traditional linear weights and RE24 a walk and a home run have very different values in that situation. For an explanation at (extreme) length, see my post about 2008’s Little Things (read this if you want an explanation of how this differs from “clutch.”)
To get the Little Things stat, I simply converted each player’s “Batting” stat from runs to wins, then subtracted that number from their WPA/LI. What all is included in this measure? Leaving aside the issue of whether “playing to the game state” is a repeatable skill, we’re measuring two sets of things: (1) as detailed above, how much the player’s contributions at the plate contribute to his team winning (or losing!) in context, and (2) those events that can happen when a player is at the plate but that aren’t measured by wRAA as implemented here. Examples of (2) would be sacrifices, reaching on error, and grounding into double plays.
Who is our 2009 King of the Little Things? Here are the top five (I only calculated for qualified players):
1. Casey Blake 1.50
2. Jorge Cantu 1.39
3. Joey Votto 1.25
4. Derrek Lee 1.22
5. Brian McCann 1.21Last year it was Jack Hannahan, which was fun, but Casey Blake is no surprise. I mean, look at that beard! He’s not great at avoiding the double play, but he’s not terrible, either. Hitting in the middle of a good Dodgers lineup behind Manny Ramirez and Andre Ethier probably gave him a lot of opportunities as well. Congratulations, Casey. Your box of Nirvana is in the mail.
You know what’s almost as fun as figuring out who is the best at something? That’s right: finding out who is the worst. Here are the bottom five out of 154 qualified 2009 batters:
150. Alex Rodriguez -1.04
151. Magglio Ordonez -1.12
152. Michael Cuddyer -1.17
153. Derek Jeter -1.42
154. Robinson Cano -1.52It’s surprising that three members of the Yankees are on this list, given that WPA/LI maps pretty directly onto wins. A-Rod’s number is obviously way off, considering how relaxed he was this season and was able to focus on baseball, thanks to Kate Hudson or getting the steroid thing off his chest or something. Cano and Jeter both have big problems with GIDP. Perhaps the Yankees played in so many blowouts that the individual contributions of these players often occurred when the outcome wasn’t in much doubt. It’s difficult to say exactly how each player got the score they did without going through individual game logs.
How about some Little Things Totals from 2007-2009. First, the leaders:
1. Matt Kemp 2.50
2. Brad Hawpe 2.34
3. Aramis Ramirez 2.04
4. Jason Kendall 2.00
5. Derrek Lee 1.97At least Matt Kemp is good at something (sigh). I’m happy for Brad Hawpe, given his other… issues. Jason Kendall is smugly chortling even as I type.
Here are the trailers:
128. Nick Markakis -2.59
129. Alex Rodriguez -2.81
130. Robinson Cano -2.93
131. Brian Roberts -2.99
132. Magglio Ordonez -3.79Here is a spreadsheet with all qualified players ranked for both 2009 and 2007-2009.
brief interviews
The Office's John Krasinski has written and directed a film adaptation of David Foster Wallace's Brief Interviews With Hideous Men. I had no idea.
Two quick notes:
- Actually, I had no idea until learned about it via the always helpful Ezra Cooper, who writes that it "can maybe best be described as a scarifying experience. Not redeptive, or cathartic, certainly, but more of a bracing shove."
- If you Google the title, the IMDB.com page for the film now outranks the Amazon.com page for the book. Hooray for Hollywood! (And for AMZN, obviously.)
D&D Player Character Sheet Resume
Sean McNally created his resume in the form of a Dungeons & Dragons player character sheet. He’s chaotic good, level 15 artist and level 7 animator.
Here’s a larger version of Sean’s resume.
via Geekologie & Super Punch
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Required Reading: "An Interview with Artist Mark Wilson" by Julie Karabenick
Mark Wilson, csq3422, 2008 (archival ink jet on rag paper, 61 x 61 cm, 24 x 24 in)
Julie Karabenick: Early in your career you made paintings and drawings. Now for almost 30 years you've used computers in making your art.
Mark Wilson: When I started using computers in 1980, very few artists were using them. To me, these machines were totally cool and exciting. Back then, there was little software of interest to an artist like myself. To make art with computers, you had to invent new working procedures. I bought a personal computer and learned to write my own software. I was trying to find a unique way of using the computer and software to create geometric images.
After developing some programming skills, the methodology of writing software to create images became utterly natural.
-- EXCERPT FROM "AN INTERVIEW WITH ARTIST MARK WILSON" BY JULIE KARABENICK ON GEOFORM
(Via Plog)
phillipckim: It’s a difficult to explain how great a motorcycle...
It’s a difficult to explain how great a motorcycle ride while listening to old favorites feels. It just can’t be beat. It’s sorta like Honey’s Dead in that you feel like they’re trying too hard to be cool and yet that attempt seems effortless and natural. In the end, you don’t really care, there’s not too much to analyze. You just hit play and go.
Restoring Fireball
Sauron has his ring, Voldemort stands victorious, the Yankees win the World Series. Evil triumphs over good. And I have a technical problem.
A couple of weeks ago, on a lark, I wrote a Gresemonkey script to replace the Yankee logo on John Gruber’s Daring Fireball with something more appropriate. I didn’t encode the graphic into the script, instead calling it from a URL, so I could change it as time went on.
The Yankees enter the ALCS:
The Phillies win the NLCS:
The Yankees win the World Series:
All fine and good and totally on the right side of history and moral probity. Except that the baseball season is now over and my little joke should be over along with it, freeing Gruber to change his logo back to the one representing Communist China instead of something that crushes the human spirit. But, um, something like 1,500 people installed the script and because I hadn’t actually planned for mid-October, they’re still going to be requesting a graphic from my site every time they visit Daring Fireball. It’s installed software. You can’t make your users upgrade.
This isn’t an uncommon problem, especially off the Web. You release something, people adopt it, and only then do you start to realize the implications of what you’re now doomed to support for ever and ever and ever.
If I’d been smart — a reach, admittedly — I would have written the script differently, loading the replacement header independently from assigning it to the display, and then not doing the assignment if the replacement wasn’t available. This would have left the normal header in place if my version wasn’t there, with only a query and a 404 response traveling over the network. Elegant! And not what I did.
I had considered putting a date check into the code, to only replace the URL during the post-season. But that hard-codes something that could potentially change, which is always dangerous. Given what they keep doing to baseball, God knows when the post-season will be next year. It just felt wrong.
And so I’m stuck, serving thousands of 7K replacement headers to a site that no longer offends for a joke that’s over. Hijacking part of Daring Fireball in a fit of Yankee-loathing pique is fun, doing it permanently is bad form.
So, OK, absent a time-machine and good sense, there are a few possibilities about how to deal with this:
Ignore it. There aren’t that many hits coming from the script, and each only generates a small amount traffic. If I host a proper version of the DF header, nobody will know the difference, probably.
This is the easiest option, as it’s already done and my hosting plan allows me hundreds and hundreds of gigs of bandwidth that I’m not using. But while ignoring a problem can make sense from a business perspective, the inelegance of it can also stick in my nerd craw like, oh, a Yankee’s World Series victory.
Set a long Expires header. Currently, the replacement graphic is only cached for the browser session, so that it will be re-queried often. I didn’t know when circumstances were going to change, and I wanted to be able to update the header as the post-season progressed. With the season over, I could set an Expires header on the image that would keep it locally cached in each visitors’ browser until late September 2010.
And while this solution solves the network traffic issue, it still requires me to host a version of the normal DF banner, preventing Gruber from changing it arbitrarily, effectively continuing to hijack his site. And again with the hard-coded date issue.
Encourage people to upgrade or remove the Geasemonkey script. Ha. While Firefox extensions can be automatically upgraded, Greasemonkey scripts can’t. For a lot of Damned Fireball users, the only time they’ve ever visited my site was to install the script. They’re never coming back, and so would never see an upgrade notice. And even if they did, the vast majority of them would ignore it. That’s just the way users are.
Use an HTTP 302 back to the original banner. When the replacement logo is requested from my server, I can respond with a HTTP 302, pointing the browser back to the original, on Daring Fireball’s server. Since that version of the banner is already cached locally (from when the page was originally requested), the only network traffic incurred is the query and a 302 response.
This “Found Elsewhere” idea is actually pretty good. It keeps the regular expiration of the graphic, so that it can be replaced should the Yankees ever luck into the post-season again, but it also doesn’t incur the traffic of constantly re-sending the replacement banner. It allows Gruber to do what he wants with his original banner since it just returns the browser to whatever was originally downloaded before the script ran.
In fact, this solution is almost as good as if I’d written the code right in the first place.
Which, in software, counts as a victory.
Hawkmadinejad's Return: Now with More Gore
Hawkmadinejad made a glorious return yesterday, shredding a pigeon in the trees near John Jay while dropping feathers and guts onto the passers-by below.
More gore after the jump!
This red-tailed hawk is sporting a brown tail, so it must be a juvenile. Since the original Hawkmadinejad was a juvy two years ago, this is another young hawk that has taken up campus hunting grounds.
Hawkma continued to pluck and eat its meal.
Feathers and organs collected below as the meal continued.
As soon as the carcass was light enough, Hawkma finished the rest of its meal on a higher perch near Hamilton.
Moving on to Kickstarter
I started working full time for Creative Commons on June 2nd, 2008 just after finishing my masters at ITP. The last year and half has been an incredible experience as I’ve spent my time doing CC outreach, advocacy, and product development. But it is time for me to move on, and I’m excited to announce that starting December 1st, I’ll be working at NYC based start-up Kickstarter.
Kickstarter is a funding platform for creators, and represents a refreshing way of thinking about supporting cultural production and creators. Most importantly, Kickstarter, like Creative Commons, offers a real mechanism for creators to connect with their supporters and share their work in a way that acknowledges the inevitabilities of digital media. Having launched and successfully funded my own project through Kickstarter, I know this platform works and I’m incredibly excited by its potential. But Kickstarter is also something that many of us in the free culture community have always dreamed of — a way to directly fund cultural production and its creators without resorting to leveraging scarcity and exclusivity.
I’m going to be doing very similar things at Kickstarter that I’ve been doing at CC: outreach, advocacy, some product, some community, some biz dev, and lots of pondering the future of culture and collaboration. But I’m also really looking forward to sharing a lot of the principles and relationships I developed at CC with my new colleagues, so if we’re currently working together on something, I’m sure we’ll still have plenty to talk about.
Working for Creative Commons has been fantastic, and I really couldn’t have imagined a better way or a better group of people to spend the last couple of years with, so it is not without some sadness that I’m leaving. So let’s stay in touch! Find me on twitter, check out my blog, or just drop me a line at fcb at fredbenenson.com.
See you on the ole tubes!
Fred
Wes Anderson at NYPL tonight
Somehow not sold out yet: Wes Anderson and Noah Baumbach talk about The Fantastic Mr. Fox at the 42nd St. NYPL tonight. Tickets here.
Tags: fantasticmrfox movies noahbaumbach NYPL Wes Anderson
In Defense of a Good Night's Sleep
In Defense of a Good Night's Sleep:A new study presented at the 2009 meeting of the Society for Neuroscience shows how disrupting your sleep cycle can interfere with your health and cognitive function. Researchers from Rockefeller University disrupted the circadian rhythms of mice by exposing them to 10 hours of light followed by 10 hours of darkness. After two months of this, the mice were in need of more than a little nap. They had difficulty learning. They were more impulsive. And they got fat, thanks in part to changes in appetite hormones and metabolism.
via Linda Stone
Sign This Shea Blogger Up
I just came across this tremendous effort- The Amazing Shea Stadium Autograph Project.
The site was started in October 2008 by a Met fan in Westfield, Indiana named Lee Harmon. As Lee wrote on his site , in honor of the 792 Mets that played at Shea,
"I created a set of handmade cards featuring each one of these men. My design was done in such a way as to allow an autograph to be included. I am now in the process of having each one signed by those players."
So far, Lee has collected 445 autographs, or 56.2 percent of his goal. His latest conquest was just this morning when he posted the signature of Gustavo Molina, a catcher who appeared in two Shea games in 2008.
Loge13 salutes you Lee and you are welcome in our virtual Shea section anytime. Keep us informed of your progress!
Cash for clunkers datapoint of the day
Good on the AP for FOIAing the details of how cash-for-clunkers played out:
The single most common swap — which occurred more than 8,200 times — involved Ford F-150 pickup owners who took advantage of a government rebate to trade their old trucks for new Ford F-150s. The fuel economy for the new trucks ranged from 15 mpg to 17 mpg based on engine size and other factors, an improvement of just 1 mpg to 3 mpg over the clunkers.
It gets worse:
In at least 145 cases the government reported consumers traded old vehicles that got better than or the same mileage as the new vehicle they purchased. A driver in Negaunee, Mich., traded a 1987 Suburban that got 18 mpg for $3,500 toward a new Silverado pickup that got only 15 mpg. An Indianapolis driver traded a 1985 Mercedes 190 that got 27 mpg for $3,500 toward a new Volkswagen Rabbit that got only 24 mpg.
In at least 15 deals in nine states, owners of large pickups cashed in old trucks for between $3,500 and $4,500 toward new Hummer H3 SUVs that got only 16 mpg.
I think this is safely the worst policy implemented to date by the Obama administration: it has almost nothing in the way of redeeming features. Let's hope it was some kind of weird aberration.
November 8, 2009
Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out
I am delighted to announce that "Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out: Kids Living and Learning with New Media" is now in the wild and available! This book was written as a collaborative effort by members of the Digital Youth Project, a three-year research effort funded by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and conducted at the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Southern California. The project was spearheaded by Mimi Ito and my late advisor Peter Lyman. I had the honor of being one of the members of this group and led one of the chapters in this book (the one on "Friendship"). If you're trying to understand the diversity of youth practices involving new media, this is a book for you!
Conventional wisdom about young people's use of digital technology often equates generational identity with technology identity: today's teens seem constantly plugged in to video games, social networks sites, and text messaging. Yet there is little actual research that investigates the intricate dynamics of youth's social and recreational use of digital media. "Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out" fills this gap, reporting on an ambitious three-year ethnographic investigation into how young people are living and learning with new media in varied settings—at home, in after school programs, and in online spaces. By focusing on media practices in the everyday contexts of family and peer interaction, the book views the relationship of youth and new media not simply in terms of technology trends but situated within the broader structural conditions of childhood and the negotiations with adults that frame the experience of youth in the United States.Integrating twenty-three different case studies—which include Harry Potter podcasting, video-game playing, music-sharing, and online romantic breakups—in a unique collaborative authorship style, "Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out" is distinctive for its combination of in-depth description of specific group dynamics with conceptual analysis.
You can also download a PDF of the book, thanks to MIT Press. All proceeds from purchases of the book go to the Peter Lyman Graduate Fellowship in New Media at the University of California-Berkeley.
This project was one of many funded by the MacArthur Foundation to explore digital media and learning. New projects in this area are being aggregated through the Digital Media and Learning Hub. If you are interested in this area of work, you should also consider attending the first annual Digital Media and Learning Conference in February in San Diego.
MySpace Facebook book HOMAGO dml
Manchester United Bar near Madison Square Garden
While the rest of you were sleeping off your nights, I was out doing Madison Square Garden recon. Early morning weekend is wonderful in the City's craziest areas. Pictures coming. In fact, throughout the next few days I'm doing a major update of Where to Eat / Drink near MSG. Come back.
In the meantime (gosh I say that frequently) Let's talk Man U. On the south side of 31st, just east of 6th Avenue, you'll find O'Reilly's Pub & Restaurant (54 West 31st Street, Manhattan). That's the least convenient MSG suggestion I will offer, but a great suggestion for NYC soccer hooligans with a Manchester United proclivity. The World's Most Popular Football Team is playing Chelsea today at 11am ET.
Information security – are we experiencing a Pax Romana?
My last startup was an information security company — SiteAdvisor — that was acquired by McAfee, where I then worked for a while. I am no longer working in security, but have many friends that do and I try to stay in touch with what’s going on in the area.
The widespread sense I get is that we are going through a period of unusual calm, especially on the consumer side. Instead of repeating the historical pattern where new types of threats emerge every few years, we’ve seen the opposite: threat types have actually gone away or been seriously mitigated. Spyware/adware is basically gone, as most of the businesses that were pushing it (yes, it was mostly driven by legal, US-based businesses) have gone bankrupt. Spam has been mostly controlled, at least if you use Gmail or a good spam filter like Postini. If you use a Mac you don’t have to worry about viruses or malware. Mobile security hasn’t ever really become an issue, mostly because the telecom carriers (and now Apple) carefully screen the installation of 3rd party apps. Identity theft is a real issue but not really something consumers can do anything about – most of it happens offline or through enterprise data center breaches.
On the enterprise and government side, things are more turbulent. Distributed denial of service attacks using botnets remain almost impossible to defend against. There have been a number of breaches of sensitive consumer information and those will likely only get more common, especially as more information gets centralized in the cloud. Military and terrorist computer attacks also seem to be a likely future threat.
All in all, though, the good guys have been keeping the bad guys down. This relative calm is generally great news for the computer users, but – let’s be honest – bad news for the computer security industry and venture capital investors. As an investor, I’ve only made one security investment in the last few years — in a cloud security startup called Vaultive. Everything else I’ve seen seems to be trying to solve non-problems or rehashing solutions that were developed years ago.
Inevitably, the calm will end and new classes of threats will emerge. But for now we should enjoy the relative peace.
Firefox Mobile Gets A Logo
"The results from the Mozilla Creative Collective's "Firefox Goes Mobile" design challenge are in, and I'm happy to announce that the winner is "Pocketfox", by Yaroslaff Chekunov. As the official emblem of the upcoming mobile version of Firefox, we'll be using this image as an avatar on social networking sites, on mozilla.com, on t-shirts and more. It makes a great addition to our portfolio of Firefox imagery!"
Somehow, hiding in a pocket isn't quite what I expected - but I'm not sure any of the runners-up were any better in capturing what Firefox could potentially bring to mobile browsing. At least, this has the advantage of simplicity. Agree, disagree? Sound off in the comments.
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