Jared Davidson, of Garage Collective and organizer of the recent exhibition of Celebrate People's History posters in New Zealand, sent me these great photos of the posters on display in the Young Adults section of the Upper Riccarton Community and School Library (for more info on the show, click HERE).
A friend of mine got a job at a big company and was shocked to see his colleagues worked just a few productive hours a day. They didn’t seem to care about their work or have relevant expertise. My friend said: “Wow, this company is going under.” Then the company released its quarterly reports and profits rose to an all-time high. The momentum of the company’s brand and relationships was sufficient to propel it forward.
On the flip side, first-time entrepreneurs often fail to realize that when you build something new, no one will care. People won’t use your product, won’t tell people about it, and almost certainly won’t pay for it. (There are exceptions – but these are as rare as winning the lottery). This doesn’t mean you’ll fail. It means you need to be smarter and harder working, and surround yourself with extraordinary people.
The default state of the world is to stay the way it is, which means the default state of a startup is failure.
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It’s kind of neat to see the city’s tech scene arranged like this. Explore the map for yourself.
To follow me on Twitter click here.
I’ve been chewing on the idea of how to share the satisfaction one gets from writing tests and pushing code with people who don’t write code. Every todo app or productivity app I’ve seen gets this part wrong. If one could bottle the satisfaction from testing and shipping into an app for doing things they’d be gold.
For the non-developers reading this&8212;writing automated tests is essentially writing a set of scripts that test paths in your application. If your code accepts user names and passwords with certain rules, then a type of automated test will attempt to log into your site however many hundreds of permutations that exist to test that the rules work. It’s a validation that your code does what is expected, and will continue to do what is expected even if you change other parts of your code.
Yes, accomplishing the task is important, but nobody (that I’ve seen) gets the other two parts right. Testing would be a verification that the task was completed and done. Pushing would be announcing or registering your daily completed tasks and getting the satisfaction of cleaning them off your plate.
This is still too geeky and stuck in my head. I think people are working on this idea. At least I assume that’s what The Obvious’ Lift is.
But even if they aren’t, I’m hopeful someone eventually makes this. Even geekier I would say my dream is to someday have a set of scripts that test and verify all the things I have set up in my life (insurance payments, property tax payments, savings to cover year-end taxes).
Essentially a set of tools to verify the processes I have done or need to do and a way to instantly test that they are all in place and working. Pretty geeky, but pretty cool to me.
]]>Yesterday, in my comments about how Facebook may fail, I wrote: "People will think it's creepy that Facebook is sharing so much of their stuff, and they won't be able to build an ad model that is more fun or lucrative than watching YouTube while tweeting."
Today, Twitter announced a "Do Not Track" Option to protect the privay of its users:
Twitter’s move to put power into the hands of the users with Do Not Track is part of a series of recent announcements by the company that seem to favor its users. Earlier this month Twitter filed a court motion to protect the information about one of its users who made use of Twitter during the Occupy Wall Street protests.
Last month Twitter was also lauded for announcing the Innovator’s Patent Agreement, a new type of patent agreement that gives legal rights to engineers who are awarded a patent, stopping any potential for a patent to be used for offensive litigation in the future.
This is going to be a big deal. I expect that these kinds of options will eventually be required by legislation.
]]>Just caught the bartender shazamming a lauryn hill song. Cannot make this up.
— David Jacobs (@djacobs) May 17, 2012
For whatever reason1, Lauryn Hill has come up in a bunch of different contexts in recent conversation. In the scenario above, the bartender in question offered the following: "I knew it was Lauryn Hill, but I want to remember to listen to the song again later." And I think I buy that. Even If it was a lie, that was a pretty great one to come up with on the spot.
I've also recommended Jay Smooth's Ill Doctrine episode about some fans' tortured relationship with Lauryn Hill a few times recently. Here it is, for easy reference!
1Actually I know the reason, because her albums were amazing, and great albums tend to echo over years and emerge from your subconscious when you don't expect it.
]]>Facebook relies on an old internet business model: display ads. Display ads generally hurt the user experience, and are also not very efficient at producing revenues. Facebook makes about 1/10th of Google’s revenues even though they have 2x the pageviews. Some estimates put Google’s search revenues per pageviews at 100-200x Facebook’s.
The good news for Facebook is there is a lot of room to target ads more effectively and put ads in more places. The bad news is that, if there is one consistent theme in both online and offline advertising, it’s that ads work dramatically better when consumers have purchasing intent. Google makes the vast majority of their revenues when people search for something to buy or hire. They don’t have to stoke demand – they simply harvest it. When people use Facebook, they are generally socializing with friends. You can put billboards all over a park, and maybe sometimes you’ll happen to convert people from non-purchasing to purchasing intents. But you end up with a cluttered park, and not very effective advertising.
The key question when trying to value Facebook’s stock is: can they find another business model that generates significantly more revenue per user without hurting the user experience? (And can they do that in an increasingly mobile world where display ads have been even less effective.) Perhaps that business model is sponsored feed entries, as Facebook seems to be hoping (along with Twitter and perhaps Tumblr). The jury is still out on that model. Personally, I have trouble seeing how insertions into the feeds aren’t just more prominent display ads. You still have to stoke demand and convert people from non-purchasing to purchasing intents. A more likely outcome is that Facebook uses their assets – a vast number of extremely engaged users, it’s social graph, Facebook Connect – to monetize through another business model. If they do that, the company is probably worth a lot more than the expected $100B IPO valuation. If they don’t, it’s probably worth a lot less.
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2 homers and a triple for Carlos Beltran tonight.Basically matching Matt Kemp’s season production, just without any of the hype.
— David Cameron (@DCameronFG) May 12, 2012
Part One: Idle Thoughts
It has recently been discovered by, like, top-top literary critics that, when T.S. Eliot writes — in his long poem “The Waste Land” — when Eliot writes that “April is the cruellest month,” he’s referring not to the tumult and angst of spring that is also the tumult and angst of the human condition, but to an entirely different phenomenon altogether.
In fact, the thing to which Eliot is actually referring is the inordinate power and influence of April numbers over the minds of even those of us who attempt to actively avoid such biases.
The reader is surely able to remember examples from past seasons when a hitter or pitcher’s hot start led to an almost season-long narrative that portrayed said player in an unduly flattering light — or, conversely, those other situations in which a player, after a very poor start, slowly hit his way back to respectability without much in the way fanfare.
The pull of these April narratives is strong. It was not, for example, until I saw the above tweet from managing editor Dave Cameron regarding Carlos Beltran and Matt Kemp that I seriously entertained the notion that the former (i.e. Beltran) had approached the latter (i.e. Kemp) in terms of production on the young season.
Indeed, as of today, Beltran trails Kemp by only 0.1 WAR (2.3 vs. 2.2) while nearly approximating Kemp’s performance at the plate (208 vs. 193 wRC+). But because of Kemp’s April — one of the best Aprils in the last 39 years — it doesn’t quite feel as though Beltran has been as productive.
Why are April narratives so powerful? Being not a scientist of any description, my own answer to that question is largely unimportant. However, were I to speculate wildly, I’d submit that at least two factors contribute to the undue influence of April narratives on the mind.
The first such factor is that particularly good or bad starts are also particularly conspicuous. Like, consider Matt Kemp and Carlos Beltran. The former hit 12 home runs in April. His closest competitor was Ryan Braun, with just seven. (Beltran, for his part, had only five.) At the end of the month, it was very difficult to regard Kemp as anything other than the SuperChampion of National League Home Run Hitters.
May has held very different fortunes for the pair: Kemp has zero home runs, while Beltran has eight. That actually gives Beltran one more homer on the season than Kemp — but Beltran has only been atop the home-run leaderboard since Friday, while Kemp had been atop said leaderboard since basically the first day of the season. Because Beltran’s run has been “nested,” as it were, within the season, it’s been more difficult to experience firsthand.
Another probably-not-actual factor that contributes to April’s undue influence on the mind is the general enthusiasm that surrounds the return of the baseball season. The season starts as the most rasa of tabulas (or, for the classically minded, the most rasae of tabulae). The fan, eager for any sort of meaningful game, finds himself going to extraordinary lengths — like waking up, for example, at 6am on a weekday to watch Oakland and Seattle play in a far away land.
Owing to this enthusiasm, the earliest days of the season occupy an inordinately large space in the fan’s memory. Speaking for myself, I remember vividly the hanging slider Shawn Kelley threw to Yoenis Cespedes, which offering Cespedes converted into his first major-league home run. That being, I’m unable to produce from memory — because I never knew in the first place — the name of the pitcher who conceded Cespedes’ most recent home run.
Part Two: Two Sets of Leaderboards
Below are two sets of leaderboards — both intended, at some level, to counteract the influence of April numbers/narratives. The first set consists simply of a WAR leaderboard and laggardboard for batters so far this May. These are players who may or may not have started well, but have performed very well through the first two weeks of baseball’s second month.
The second set consists of a SCOUT leaderboard and laggardboard for May. Like the SCOUT leaderboards published for winter leagues and spring training, these utilize regressed home-run, walk, and strikeout rates in an attempt to approximate something like “true talent” wRC+. (Read more about SCOUT here.)
Here’s the batter WAR leaderboard for May so far:
| Name | PA | wRC+ | Fld | BsR | WAR |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Josh Hamilton | 47 | 319 | -0.3 | 0.4 | 1.4 |
| Carlos Beltran | 50 | 290 | 0.2 | 0.1 | 1.4 |
| Rafael Furcal | 52 | 262 | -0.2 | 0.1 | 1.3 |
| Elvis Andrus | 57 | 196 | 1.0 | 0.2 | 1.1 |
| Joey Votto | 48 | 246 | 0.2 | 0.2 | 1.0 |
| Matt Holliday | 52 | 194 | 1.8 | 0.1 | 1.0 |
| J.J. Hardy | 58 | 187 | 0.3 | 0.1 | 1.0 |
| Giancarlo Stanton | 54 | 224 | -0.6 | 0.1 | 0.9 |
| Austin Jackson | 52 | 181 | 1.4 | 0.3 | 0.9 |
| Andrew McCutchen | 35 | 270 | -0.4 | 0.4 | 0.9 |
And the WAR laggardboard for May:
| Name | PA | wRC+ | Fld | BsR | WAR |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Danny Valencia | 26 | -100 | -0.3 | 0.1 | -0.5 |
| Chris Parmelee | 29 | -34 | -1.0 | -0.1 | -0.5 |
| J.D. Martinez | 28 | -61 | -0.4 | -0.1 | -0.5 |
| Albert Pujols | 47 | 1 | 0.6 | -0.9 | -0.5 |
| Conor Gillaspie | 20 | -13 | -2.5 | 0.0 | -0.5 |
| Eric Hosmer | 45 | 13 | -0.9 | 0.5 | -0.4 |
| Alex Presley | 33 | -35 | 0.0 | 0.2 | -0.4 |
| Erick Aybar | 34 | -21 | -0.6 | -0.1 | -0.4 |
| Eric Thames | 43 | 39 | -2.1 | 0.3 | -0.4 |
| Buster Posey | 44 | 1 | -0.5 | -0.3 | -0.4 |
Here’s the SCOUT leaderboard for May:
| Name | PA | HR% | BB% | K% | xHR% | xBB% | xK% | SCOUT+ |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Josh Hamilton | 47 | 19.1% | 12.8% | 27.7% | 5.4% | 10.0% | 20.7% | 125 |
| Carlos Beltran | 50 | 16.0% | 12.0% | 22.0% | 5.0% | 9.9% | 19.1% | 124 |
| Ben Zobrist | 47 | 4.3% | 21.3% | 2.1% | 3.0% | 12.0% | 12.7% | 119 |
| Adam Dunn | 55 | 10.9% | 21.8% | 29.1% | 4.3% | 12.6% | 21.8% | 118 |
| Joey Votto | 48 | 6.3% | 22.9% | 12.5% | 3.4% | 12.5% | 16.0% | 118 |
| Nick Markakis | 57 | 7.0% | 15.8% | 15.8% | 3.6% | 11.1% | 16.9% | 115 |
| Jose Bautista | 51 | 9.8% | 11.8% | 17.6% | 4.0% | 9.8% | 17.6% | 115 |
| Giancarlo Stanton | 54 | 11.1% | 11.1% | 22.2% | 4.3% | 9.7% | 19.2% | 115 |
| Asdrubal Cabrera | 60 | 1.7% | 16.7% | 5.0% | 2.6% | 11.4% | 12.5% | 113 |
| Rafael Furcal | 52 | 3.8% | 11.5% | 3.8% | 3.0% | 9.8% | 12.8% | 112 |
And the SCOUT laggardboard for May:
| Name | PA | HR% | BB% | K% | xHR% | xBB% | xK% | SCOUT+ |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Miguel Montero | 47 | 0.0% | 10.6% | 38.3% | 2.4% | 9.5% | 24.1% | 84 |
| Ryan Raburn | 39 | 0.0% | 5.1% | 35.9% | 2.4% | 8.4% | 22.3% | 85 |
| Chris Davis | 44 | 2.3% | 2.3% | 34.1% | 2.7% | 7.7% | 22.4% | 86 |
| Buster Posey | 44 | 0.0% | 4.5% | 27.3% | 2.4% | 8.1% | 20.4% | 87 |
| Miguel Cabrera | 53 | 0.0% | 0.0% | 17.0% | 2.3% | 6.7% | 17.4% | 88 |
| Eric Thames | 43 | 2.3% | 4.7% | 32.6% | 2.7% | 8.2% | 21.9% | 88 |
| Corey Hart | 48 | 2.1% | 4.2% | 27.1% | 2.7% | 8.0% | 20.6% | 89 |
| Justin Upton | 50 | 2.0% | 6.0% | 28.0% | 2.7% | 8.4% | 21.1% | 90 |
| Alexei Ramirez | 50 | 0.0% | 0.0% | 14.0% | 2.3% | 6.9% | 16.4% | 90 |
| Aaron Hill | 46 | 0.0% | 2.2% | 17.4% | 2.4% | 7.6% | 17.5% | 90 |
One nice side effect of docking on the right is that it makes developing responsive designs much easier. Instead of resizing the entire Chrome window, you can instead pull the divider between the viewport and the dev tools.
I don't remember if this was the case ten years ago — I'm not sure there even was a default Credits file — but I'm quite sure it was my own idea to thank my Mom in AppKiDo's About box:
It bears repeating: Thanks, Mom! I love you!
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Some mornings only something sweet, salty and fried will cure what ails you. These simple fritters come together in no time with ingredients from the pantry and freezer. As long as you're together enough to handle a few inches of hot oil, getting some corn fritters on the table takes only a few minutes and ingredients.
Corn fritters are a great way to feed a group of people since they walk the line between sweet and savory. If you're like me, you'll want your plate of fritters garnished with a few sliced scallions and a dash of hot sauce and lime juice. But if you've got a sweet tooth, then a quick toss in some powdered sugar, or maybe a drizzle of syrup will be what you reach for—either choice works well.
About the author: Sydney Oland lives in Somerville, Mass. Find more information at sydneyoland.com (or read eatingnosetotail.com)
Get the Recipe!]]>
Adjacent to the excellent Miss Lily’s on Houston Street, is the new home of Melvin Major—the juice king of New York.
Melvin developed a celebrity-cult following during his years at Lifethyme Market a few blocks up Sixth Avenue, and, at the beginning of this year, finally broke away to open his own spot as part of the Miss Lily’s empire.
The space is located in the back of Miss Lily’s Variety, a shop that sells rare and influential Reggae vinyl along with posters and other memorabilia.
The store is as bright and happy as Melvin himself with blue-and-white tile floors, colorful peg menu boards and vintage tables and chairs.
The juices all have clever names like “Jamaican Green” and “Catch a Fire” and are all made using organic fruits and vegetables. We love “The Real V-8,” a mix of kale, collard greens, cabbage, red onion, red pepper, tomato, lemon, ginger, garlic, apple cider vinegar and cayenne pepper.
Juices aside, the shakes are a personal favorite of ours. Unlike some big name places around town they aren’t watered-down with a ton of ice or made into sugary confections. The protein shakes aren’t just breakfast worthy—you may find yourself not wanting lunch either.
If you are still feeling peckish, the food menu has Jamaican staples like beef patties and jerk chicken, perfect to enjoy on the benches out front or at one of the tables in the presence of Melvin, working his magic.
Indeed, the best thing about the Juice Box is Melvin himself. He is simply a joy to be around, and maintains a smile the entire time you’re talking to him. He is passionate about the juice he makes, and has definitely worked hard to make sure each recipe is perfect.
When I asked for a picture he responded sternly “Five dollars!”, but after waiting a few seconds he flashed his blinding smile at me, let out a hearty laugh and told me to take as many as I wanted as he continued chopping away at lemons and beets.
We’re hoping Melvin stays right where he is this time, though now that we’ve discovered his addictive elixirs, we would probably follow him wherever he might go.
- Ryan
P.S. Enjoy your weekend! We are off to Montreal on Saturday a little mini-vacation next week. We’re taking the Amtrak up, which we’ve heard is gorgeous. Anyone ever done it?
©2012 Smith & Ratliff. All Rights Reserved.
.]]>I guessed, or maybe saw somewhere, that Okamoto manages John Geleynse. Today I was thinking about Developer Relations again and came across Geleynse's LinkedIn page, where he describes his dual role as both Director of Technology Evangelism and User Experience Evangelist at Apple.
Geleynse's mission, as I understand it, is to help developers be Apple developers in the strongest possible sense of the term. He and his team help us learn and use Apple technology, and he helps us design user experiences that are up to Apple's standards.
I see he's not responsible for the sort of plumbing issues that are most often complained about, like Radar, like app reviews and rejections, or like the recent fiasco with WWDC tickets being revoked. But he might be someone to bug (assuming he's approachable) about the uncertainty around sandboxing.
I saw Geleynse helping someone at a Tech Talk years ago, and he seemed interesting. I wonder if he'll give a talk or have some sort of presence at WWDC other than hosting the Apple Design Awards.
]]>Director, Technology Evangelism
Apple Inc.
Public Company; 10,001+ employees; AAPL; Consumer Electronics industry
December 2002 – Present (9 years 6 months)
Responsible for directing a team of technology Evangelists who:
- Provide the technical guidance and insight needed by 3rd parties to build elegant, attractive, innovative, connected, integrated, and great software solutions for iPad, iPhone, and Mac
- Promote advanced iOS and OS X technologies and software development techniques to the 3rd party ISV and software development community
- Work with Apple’s engineering and interface design teams to efficiently address technology adoption issues faced by 3rd party software developers
- Track 3rd party developer technology needs and communicate them cross-functionally within Apple
- Define and manage the technical content for the annual Apple Worldwide Developer's Conference (WWDC) and annual Tech Talks
- Manage and host the annual Apple Design Awards
User Experience Evangelist
Apple Inc.
Public Company; 10,001+ employees; AAPL; Consumer Electronics industry
November 1999 – Present (12 years 7 months)
The user experience for Mac OS X applications encompasses the visual appearance, interactive behavior, and assistive capabilities of software.Primary responsibilites include:
- Working one on one with 3rd party software development team to ensure that products they're building deliver a truly Mac OS X user experience
- Improving the user interfaces of 3rd party software products via design audit/review meetings in which every application window, dialog, palette, toolbar, and icon is reviewied for Aqua compliance and the overall usability and interaction design is analyzed and re-designed
- Defining the lions-share contents of each revision of the Apple Human Interface Guidelines
- Working closely with Apple OS Engineering to ensure Aqua adoption issues faced by 3rd party developers are addressed.
If you haven't checked out the Justseeds store lately, you might have missed the cascade of new Celebrate People's History posters that have been coming out. I'm excited to announce that a half dozen have been printed, and another half dozen are on their way in the next couple months. These are the first new posters in the series in over a year—there are some great ones, and they are still only $4 a pop! Check out:
Wisconsin Workers Uprising by Sue Simensky Bietila
Jane Jacobs by Sabrina Jones
Major Taylor by Janet Attard
Vieques Libre by Dave Buchen
Jamaican Maroons by Damon Locks
Sacred Ground by Aaron Samsel
If you want your Twin Peaks swag signed, or meet the wonderful actresses that played Laura Palmer/Maddy Ferguson and Audrey Horne, grab a discounted advance ticket now, starting at $35 for one day or $75 for all four.
Of course, tons of other celebrities will be in attendance too, including William Shatner, Hayden Panettiere and, ahem, Mike “The Situation” Sorrentino!
Chicago Comic Con 2012 dates:
Thursday, August 9 – 12 noon – 8pm
Friday, August 10 – 12 noon – 8pm
Saturday, August 11- 10am – 7pm
Sunday, August 12- 10am – 5pm
Thanks for the tip, Scott S.!
Visit Welcome to Twin Peaks.
Dash, by Bogdan Popescu, is a brilliant developer utility that removes friction from two key areas of programming: looking up documentation and reusing code snippets. I haven't played with the snippets manager, and I've only played with the doc browser for a few minutes, but already I notice some excellent things:
In Xcode, URLs are clickable when they appear in comments. Unfortunately, this doesn't work with dash:// URLs. I've filed a Radar requesting the ability to specify more URL schemes for Xcode to recognize. In the meantime, if one wanted clickable links badly enough, I suppose one could run a local HTTP server that converts localhost URLs to Dash URLs. Maybe Dash could have such a server built in? Would it be worth it?
More suggestions:
Add a Service that performs a search, much like a dash:// URL, but using the currently selected text in my frontmost application (which might be Dash itself).
[UPDATE: @kapelimac informs me that Dash has had a "Lookup in Dash" Service for quite a while. My fault for not spotting it.]
Auto-detect method names. When I come across a method call like [obj doThis:xxx withThis:yyy] I'd like to be able to double-click one of the brackets to select the whole expression, and invoke the above-mentioned Service to perform a search. I'd like Dash to recognize that what I mean to search for is "doThis:withThis:". For extra credit, be able to detect a method name in any string that contains a colon. Or if that's too hard, any string that begins with a square bracket.
Add a social element such as Scott Anguish suggested a while back. This might not be a direction Bogdan wants to invest in, but it would be an interesting experiment. Of course, that's easy to say when I'm not the one doing the investing.
[UPDATE: More from @kapelimac: "And another note: Dash has had Wiki pages for each method/class, but no one used them, so I removed them. And: "I plan on adding Disqus threads to all documentation pages, but I'm still waiting on a reply from @disqushelp if they allow it."]
I see from Dash's Twitter feed that Bogdan is quite actively working on the app, and in fact plans to start charging for it with the next release. I encourage you to check it out now while it is free, and to consider buying when Bogdan sets a price on it.
]]>- Start every morning by skimming through news, blogs, articles, etc. Much of this is tech related. I used to get tech news in the newspaper, then in Google Reader, and now mostly from Twitter. If someone I meet mentions something interesting that was published that I didn’t read, I go back and figure out how I missed it and change who I follow on Twitter so it doesn’t happen again.
- Try to meet with interesting people during the week. The reason being up on tech news is important is so that we can get the most out of the meetings. Often we’ll talk about whatever each of us is working on at the time but it’s also good to have news or blog posts as shared reference points. This makes the meetings more interesting for everyone.
- Try to learn at least one interesting thing each week and then blog about it. Then see how people react in comments, on Twitter etc. I guess some bloggers don’t like comments but for me they are the crucial so that I can get feedback on new hypotheses. Blogging new hypotheses also means a decent portion of your blog posts need to be ignored or ridiculed. Otherwise you are playing it too safe.
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On May 20th, the Tampa Bay Rays broadcast team is going to invite a former STATS Inc. intern, a Stanford economics graduate, a former All-American athlete, a College World Series record holder, a diabetic, a man with a Wikipedia page containing over 6,300 words in it, a man who eats bullets washed in the tears of his enemies and a few of his friends, and an active major league baseball player in the booth.
Figured it out yet?
THEY’RE ALL ONE PERSON.
That’s right, Mr. Super Sam Fuld will be joining the Tampa Bay Rays broadcast team in the booth to talk about sabermetrics. What?! That’s right. Those fancy acronumbers and oozer ratings.
This brings to light a more important issue, however. The Rays broadcast rankings.
Last year, FanGraphs readers voted the Rays broadcast — featuring Brian Anderson and Dewayne Staats — as No. 10 of the 31 broadcast teams. I think it’s about time they make a move up that chart.
Do they possess the TRIFORCE OF BROADCASTING EXCELLENCE? Yes:
1. Nightly double-entendres? CHECK.
2. Progressively analytic undertones? CHECK.
3. Baby pictures of the color man? YOU TELL ME:
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The attentive reader will know that my colleague and champion of the vulgar Dayn Perry has made a practice in these pages — via his Nickname Seeks Player series — has made a practice of (in his words) “assign[ing] cool nicknames to players rather than perpetuate the tired, lamewad practice of assigning cool players nicknames.”
While Perry’s point regarding the assignment of nicknames is unassailable, it’s also the case that sometimes nicknames are not assigned at all, but are instead revealed — as if out of the ether.
Such was the case, this afternoon, when out of my friend Dan Woytek’s mind (itself not unlike the ether) and onto his computer email screen came a suitable nickname for major-league baseball’s current leader in BABIP and owner, now, of a career BABIP somewhere north of .385, Bryan LaHair.
This is the nickname in question: In Play, No Outs.
This is your reaction to it: surprise and/or amazement, probably.
This is what you might proceed to do now: tell at least one person.
This is what you’ll probably also do: the other things you had planned.
Follow Dan Woytek on Twitter at @dwoytek, in case he says one more amusing thing before he dies or you die.
That this comes a day after North Carolina residents banned gay marriage in all its forms makes this news all the more enjoyable. Fifty years ago many Americans were against civil rights for African-Americans, too. As Dave Pell noted in his NextDraft newsletter today, "History's march towards equal rights often feels inevitable, but it can really take a long time." Yesterday we slowed down, and today we sped up again.
Next Saturday I am attending a wedding party for my gay friends Chris and Stuart, who are getting married at City Hall, because as New Yorkers they thankfully can do so. I couldn't be happier for them, or more supportive of their right to be married. And I am glad that the President of the United States of America feels the same way.
]]>1. I actually had to google Carly Rae Jepsen, the artist behind this gummy candy of a song — I had heard the name but had no idea how to identify her otherwise. I found out a bunch of stuff, like: she’s 26 (about ten years older than I figured when I heard the song). She placed third in the fifth season of Canadian Idol, which is, um, Canada’s version of American Idol (this is in keeping with a long tradition of non-winning finalists going on to more success after Idol than the winners, except for Kelly Clarkson, who is obviously the best thing that has/will ever come of that atrocious television show). She was the first musician signed to Justin Bieber’s Schoolboy Records, supposedly after the kid heard her sing and demanded her for his kingdom. She actually is quite pretty, in that kind of approachable (read: brunette) way that other girls aren’t spiteful about. She grew up on James Taylor, which I did as well, so I sympathize with that, but now “spins” La Roux and Kimbra, and I don’t know what those things are.
2. As for Harvard’s baseball team, I learned that they were ranked 233rd among Div I NCAA teams this past season, going 12-30 during the season with a team batting average of .285, an OBP of .350, and a slugging percentage of .368. You know what, though? These guys aren’t getting paid. Baseball isn’t their job and they’re probably pretty good at doing what all college athletes are theoretically at school for anyway (learnin’ and shit). I’m happy for them that despite a pretty dismal season, they decided to choreograph this dance routine to Carly Rae Jepsen’s Call Me Maybe.
3. But more than that, I’m happy for all of us that we get to watch it. It is truly a delight to behold, a present in YouTube form, bound to inspire Actual Smiling — unless your face is paralyzed, in which case, I’m sorry, and I hope you’re smiling on the inside! This is great, really. Thank you, handsome college dudes.
This is the second in a series of short excerpts from MLB Network’s entirely imaginary new fall sitcoms. More details here.
Today’s show: SEINFULD
INT. RAYS DUGOUT -- DAY
SAM and GEORGE are sitting on the bench.
SAM
Joe Maddon caught me.
GEORGE
He caught you?
SAM
Yeah, he caught me.
GEORGE
Oh, he’s caught me dozens of times. I always think I’m alone, but then, there he is. It’s very embarrassing. But it’s hard to stay occupied when you’re a bench player. I get bored.
SAM
No, idiot. He caught me trying to learn how to throw a knuckleball.
GEORGE
I’ve never heard that euphemism before.
SAM
It’s not a euphemism. I’m trying to learn how to throw a knuckleball in order to extend my career, since it seems like I am not destined to stay healthy and productive for long enough stretches as an outfielder, despite my excellent defense, solid batting eye, surprising power, and unique biographical details that make me a fan favorite among the well-educated and sabermetrically-aware baseball fans.
GEORGE
I thought you were talking about something else.
SAM
Yes, I figured that out.
This mania is what Marvel followers have hungered for, and it would be fruitless to deny their delight. As Loki says to a crowd of earthlings, ‘It is the unspoken truth of humanity that you crave subjugation.’ We do, Master, we do.
'I aim to misbehave,’ Malcolm Reynolds famously said in ‘Serenity.’ But for all their maverick swagger, the Avengers are dutiful corporate citizens, serving a conveniently vague set of principles. Are they serving private interests, big government, their own vanity, or what? It hardly matters, because the true guiding spirit of their movie is Loki, who promises to set the human race free from freedom and who can be counted on for a big show wherever he goes. In Germany he compels a crowd to kneel before him in mute, terrified awe, and ‘The Avengers,’ which recently opened there to huge box office returns, expects a similarly submissive audience here at home. The price of entertainment is obedience.
It's astounding that The New Yorker and The New York Times, two of the most venerable (if not THE most venerable) brands in old media, show open disdain for their readers, strongly implying in their summary paragraphs that attendees of what turned out to be the biggest opening weekend in history were open to being subjects of an imperial or fascist ruler. How much of an over reach is that? We're living in a world in which fascist rulers are still in power, and we're facing real issues at home (obviously), as yesterday's vote in North Carolina shows. How is it possible that prominent film reviewers can be so out of touch with a mass audience?
Last election cycle Anil Dash wrote What Sarah Palin is saying, a post about how people communicate in the modern age:
Linguists use the phrase "code switching" to refer to the act of using more than one language when speaking. As someone who grew up in a multilingual household, I'm intimately familiar with code-switching, and one of the most interesting traits about the practice is not merely how easy it is for people to switch language on the fly, but rather how the choice of language actually informs the meaning and the nuance of the words being said.
This is exactly what Joss Whedon does in his films and television shows as well. But where Palin (and others) used this language to advance a dangerous right-wing agenda, Whedon uses it to advance a counter-cultural, anti-war agenda. He is a master storyteller. In a conversation between two or three characters, all of their characters are developed at once and the plot is advanced. Whedon rewards even a casually close reader of his movies by embedding multiple meanings in dialogue, which is how a movie with 9 or 10 main characters can feel as satisfying as a blockbuster with only two or three. He also references a geek sensibility (Galaga, Wizard of Oz, Stephen Hawking), without hiding his agenda too deeply in the subtext.
The lessons of The Avengers — refuse authority, nuclear weapons are evil, green energy is important, the scientific method leads to truth (and before you roll your eyes, at least Whedon MENTIONS the scientific method, instead of creating scientists who are merely struck by "divine inspiration" when solving a problem), a group of people are more powerful as a unit than individually — are all more or less absent from most action movies. This is not a radical or even explicitly anti-war text, but it is meaningful that Joss Whedon makes a show of Tony Stark undressing from battle but not dressing in Iron Man's suit. This is markedly different than the Iron man prequels.
(Spoiler in this paragraph). Whedon doesn't like nuclear weapons, and he doesn't like the government, so he makes the highest-stakes moment of the movie one in which the main character of the franchise sacrifices his life to take the nuclear missile launched by the US govenment to blow up Manhattan into the alien dimension. After succeeding, our hero lies lifeless on Park Avenue, but the Hulk brings him back to life not by transforming back into Dr. Banner, the most cloying thing that could happen, but by literally roaring him back to life. It's a moment that is at once nonobvious and ecstatic. If one hundred different directors made this movie, one hundred of them would resurrect Tony Stark, he is necessary for the sequels. But only Whedon, who's career has in part been made by his fan base, would resurrect Stark with the Hulk's roar, the fan's roar. This neat trick completes Dr. Banner's journey. The Hulk, heretofore know only for his smash, is now the healer as well.
Matt Haughey wrote about modern movies invoking 9/11 imagery, and I agree that this is a troubling trend that makes me uncomfortable watching many action movies. But I did not feel what Matt (and others) felt when watching the film. I appreciated that the imagery of mourning echoed 9/11, but not the action scenes themselves, and that Whedon also took time to leave the police & fire department in critical roles. Whedon also avoided many of the cliche signifiers of 9/11ism; there is no dust-covered populace, no skyscraper falling in on itself, no jet colliding with a building, and of course no suicide bomber behind the nuclear attack - it is launched by a "council" in absentia.
From an interview with Joss Whedon in Wired UK
You studied with the film professor Jeanine Basinger at Wesleyan. Did she teach a strong gender studies component?
No. She was teaching about genre and directors and the studio system. It was really, 'What do you see? What do you feel? How did they do that and why?' That was her thing. It was very nonspecific. The thing that we talked about was a film student's paper is only ever about themselves. The audience member only ever brings themselves to the movies. The whole point was you're going to bring your obsession to whatever it is. But are you really looking at what they're doing through the lens of your obsession, or are you trying to fit something into your agenda? Obsession and agenda not the same. My obsession was gender.
I remember thinking that my gender studies classes, especially literary ones, didn't bring many tools to bear that I found useful for looking at text.
Yeah, the big thing I always get is, 'That rape scene was offensive because it was disturbing.' I'm like, as opposed to the sexy rape scene? It's so easy to be knee-jerk on either side. There's this amazing film critic, Robin Wood, who I got to come and speak at Wesleyan. He talked about Ingrid Bergman and Alfred Hitchcock and it was just riveting. All his stuff. You know, it was seminal for me. He's very political. But he talks about, I want to say from Roland Barthes but I'm not sure, the incoherent text.X-Men is an incoherent text. It's a movie that's saying one thing when it clearly or at least partially means another. It's like when you're saying 'war is bad,' but don't you just want to see Rambo suit up?
There is much more to say, but I am losing focus and I have to go get my iPhone replaced. I will end on a note from my friend @nataliepo:
I did spend most of the time waiting for the fight scenes to end so the characters could to talk to each other. I'd much prefer a superhero movie with literally no physical conflict. My ideal? A Hulk comedy, reflecting on the humanity of super-sized anger, using it to pay the bills in a quarry or something. An Iron Man political thriller, where his superbots serve as a mere plot element. Captain America aged, alone, living in Ditmas Park, watching Girls and trying to relate. Thor in anything at all whatsover with Kristen Wiig.
Are you paying attention, The New York Times and Yorker editors? That is how you write a critical review playfully, personally and with empathy. Just because a movie is made for a younger generation doesn't mean that generation is unaware of fascist imagery. It's actually the opposite. I suspect some critics are aware code switching is happening, but they aren't able, or are simply too lazy, to decode it themselves, so they claim fascism and call it a day. Not cool!
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"Getting the details right is the difference between something that delights, and something customers tolerate."
—Jeff Atwood
I didn't read Jeff Atwood's article about cat feeders right away, because it really is 90% about a cat product. It's also a terrific demonstration of what he's saying above. The first version of the product, a cat feeder, served a core need well enough for him to satisfice with its shortcomings because the net return in time savings and improved quality of life, for him anyway, was absolutely worth it.
The punchline is this.
Listening to the opinions expressed by customers, obsessing over the details, and getting them right in the design is necessary and hard. But over time, if the points of pain are incrementally addressed and the design improved, the collection of those well-thought-out details embody a better experience.
Get better slowly, but do get better. Suck it up and feel your users' pain. Assure them that you're listening by sweating the details.
Post a review of Lunch in Brooklyn on Amazon that mentions Fallen Princess and win one of 10 vintage Sassy/Nirvana stickers.Yeah, pretty sweet! Email me (christinamkelly@aol.com) the link of your review along with a mailing address. Here is the link for the purchasing and reviewing. 
Our next CocoaConf event will be held on June 28–30, 2012, in Herndon, VA (Washington, DC area). Registration is now open and there are still some tickets available. We will have 18 great speakers, including Daniel Steinberg, Chris Adamson, Mark Dalrymple, Saul Mora, Mike Ash, and more. Get all of the details at CocoaConf.com. When you register, use the coupon code MARCO for a $100 discount off of the regular registration rates.
To hear about future CocoaConf events and other interesting information, follow us on Twitter at @cocoaconf.
Thanks to CocoaConf for sponsoring the Marco.org RSS feed this week.
]]>We’re excited to announce the official launch of Storyboard, our new hub for in-depth conversations with Tumblr’s creative community. We’ll be posting regular features on creators working in and around Tumblr’s massively diverse cosmos — writers, musicians, animators, scientists, artists, archivists, chefs, comedians, or anyone else with a great story to tell. Today we’re talking about Michael Stipe, the New York Times, Afghanistan, and the design mechanics of the Tumblr Dashboard.
We want to hear your stories too. If you’re interested in submitting a story (or even a story idea) for us to publish, just post it on Tumblr tagged with #storyboard. Our editors will monitor the tag and the community’s interactions there, promoting stories that resonate. And if your story really works, we’ll ask to expand it for publication on Storyboard itself.
Last but not least, if you find yourself in New York City on May 10, we’d love to hang out at the official Tumblr meetup celebrating Storyboard’s launch. It’s at Powerhouse Arena, 7-9pm, with drinks on us and several Tumblr celebrity mystery guests (cough Topherchris, Tommypom, cough).
Excellent.
]]>I designed this system around the idea of a pipeline of related processes, where each component is as independent and idempotent as possible. This has positives and negatives; it's an abstraction like any other.
I initially wrote the "fetch remote web page" and "analyze data from that page" as a single step, because I thought "analyze" was the main goal and "fetch" was a dependent task. I separated them a couple of weeks ago to simplify the system: analysis now expects data to be there, while fetching can be parallel on a single or across multiple machines. (Testing the analysis step is also much easier because feeding in dummy data is now trivial.)
I use the filesystem as a cache for these fetched files. That's easy to
manage. I modified the role I use to grab data for the analysis stage to look
in the cache first, then fall back to a network request. That was easy too. The
get_formatted_data_for_analysis() method looked something like:
sub get_formatted_data_for_analysis
{
my ($self, $type, $key) = @_;
my $cached_path = $self->get_cached_path( $type, $key );
if (-e $cached_path)
{
my $text = read_file( $cached_path );
return $self->formatter->format_string( $text ) if $text;
}
return $self->formatter->format_string( $self->fetch_by_url( $type, $key ) );
}I thought I was done. This trivial caching layer took five minutes to write and gave my project a lot of flexibility.
I thought this would speed up the processing stage, because I was able to make the fetching stage embarrassingly parallel so that more than one fetch could block on network IO simultaneously. My rough benchmark didn't show any speed improvement, but it was fast enough, so I moved on.
On Friday I decided to profile the slowest stage of the application with Devel::NYTProf. The slowest stage was the processing stage. I isolated it so that it performed no network fetching. It was still slow.
One of the formatter modules used to extract data from web pages is HTML::FormatText::Lynx.
It allows me to run lynx --dump to strip out all of the HTML and
other formatting of a document. The formatter allows you to pass in the name of
a file or the contents of a file as a string.
For some reason, most of the time in the processing stage in the profile was spent in file IO. That wasn't too surprising; these aren't all small files and there may be thousands of them. I dug deeper.
Most of the time in the processing stage in the profile was spent in reading the files in my method and reading files in the formatter—reading files, even though I was passing the contents of those files to the formatter as strings.
I poked around at a few other things, but came back to the source code of the formatter. A comment in HTML::FormatExternal says:
format_string()takes the easy approach of putting the string in a temp file and lettingformat_file()do the real work. The formatter programs can generally read stdin and write stdout, so could do that withselect()to simultaneously write and read back.
In other words, all of the work I was doing to read in files was busy work, duplicating what the formatter was about to do anyway. (Okay, I stared at the code for a couple of minutes, thinking about various approaches of rewriting it and submitting a patch or monkey patching it. Then I turned lazier and wiser.) I rewrote my code:
sub get_formatted_data_for_analysis
{
my ($self, $type, $key) = @_;
my $cached_path = $self->get_cached_path( $type, $key );
return $self->formatter->format_file( $cached_path ) if -e $cached_path;
return $self->formatter->format_text( $self->fetch_by_url( $type, $key ) );
}The result was a 25% performance improvement.
Three things jumped out at me in this process. First, how nice is it to have a working tool like NYTProf and a community that distributes source code, so that I could examine the whole stack of my application to isolate performance problems? Second, how interesting that an assumption and an admitted shortcut in a dependency could have such an effect on my own code. Third, how much more I like my new code with all of the file handling gone; pushing that responsibility elsewhere is a nice simplification without the performance improvement.
Perhaps the two tools I miss most from my C programming days are Valgrind/Callgrind and KCachegrind, but NYTProf goes a long way toward filling that gap. Besides, I'm at least 20 times more productive with a language like Perl.
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