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Bee on Flower

Bee on Flower
Originally uploaded by finn.

Finn's "Bee on Flower" is a seminal moment in photobloggia. He's got macro mode on, a fuzzy background, an insect, a flower, and he's ON the high line. Compare this to Haughey's self-professed "greatest ever," which features the sunglasses of Jason Kottke, but only has the high line in the background, and does not feature an insect in macro mode.

I give this round to Finn. Of course, this is purely subjective, but it doesn't have to be. We should be allowed to assign pandering points to tags in flickr, and then a simple query would reveal the photobloggiest images.

Macro Mode=5
The High Line=25
In New York=5
Flower=10
Mirror Shot=2


and so on.

Overheard this Evening

Ken Jennings is the KRC-One of Jeopardy.

New Post

Content of my post.

Thank you

Thank you
Originally uploaded by sudama.

I'm at Sudama's House

iTunes Woes

Show Duplicate Songs
3176 songs, 9.9 days, 16.89 GB
I call this "the chore"

The Macy's Day Parade

GSuper rover
Originally uploaded by kathryn.

I love the Macy's Day Parade. When I was young, we'd come up for New York many Thansgivings, and the parade was always a highlight for me. Years we stayed home, I would watch it on television and curse the announcers who hogged screen time.

New York's sheer size inspires imagination among residents and visitors alike, and New Yorkers are notoriously difficult to impress, but everyone loves a 10 story-tall grover.

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Finn Life

Finn Life
Originally uploaded by david.

Finn Mug

Finn Mug
Originally uploaded by david.

Mo Mo Moblogging, 24 in 48.

I'm participating in 24 in 48, Lia's thesis project. Nice work if you can get it - her friends moblog for two days, and she gets a degree! I'm trying to make her life even easier by interrogating the difference between private and public spaces, often where photos are forbidden. This includes but is not limited to: construction sites, bathrooms, subways, and starbucks coffee storefronts. Just to keep her honest I've also taken entirely self-indulgent pictures of my work and home.

djacobs globehead

djacobs globehead 
Originally uploaded by &mark.

I love this!

Ian's Shoelace Site - Ian's Secure Shoelace Knot

I just happened upon Ian's Secure Shoelace Knot, via Adam Rice's delicious links. I'm definitely tying my shoes this way tomorrow - I love learning new ways to carry out the simplest and most common tasks.

Disposable Heroes

Dodger Thoughts: The Disposable Baseball Blogger:

I did a post on Albert Pujols right after a game in which he downed the Cubs with three home runs. I put up the post, noticed a small error, corrected it, and by the time I returned to the main page - seriously, a 10-second process altogether - there was already a comment from a fan. Within 10 seconds! I’m a screenwriter during the day, and in my job it can sometimes take years and years for something to go from idea to screen. With Redbird Nation it was instantaneous. That moment after the Pujols game reminded me just how closely connected I was to this community of Cards fans sharing in my excitement

<Anil>Jim Weisman has put together a fantastic recap of 2004's baseball microcontent explosion.</Anil> If only every article about blogs was this well researched and written by someone this knowledgeable. Blogging connects people with information and passion to new audiences, and this is a nearly perfect case study.

New Yorker and Lessig

New Yorker and Lessig, originally uploaded by mathowie.

So I'm reading a piece in the New Yorker by Malcolm Gladwell about a playwright sampling an earlier article of his, and then it goes into music sampling, and quotes liberally from Lawrence Lessig's new book, and due to the weird world I live in, Lessig happens to IM me at the exact moment I'm reading his quotes.

FlickR is quickly becoming the Haight & Ashbury of new media. Like Metafilter, but larger, more open and with filtering for friends and contacts.

Interview with an Animated Star

Interview with an Animated Star
Originally uploaded by kathryn.

The movie was great, but I did want a little more Frozone.

Marathon

I finished!

It almost doesn't seem real except for the sore muscles that demand I walk down stairs backwards or not at all, reminding me that on Sunday I ran farther and longer than I've ever run before.

I've been neglect in my marathon posting duties, partially because I've been busy and exhausted and partially because I don't have much to add to the words of meg and alaina and the photos on flickr.

My apologies to all the authors of "Congratulations!" emails that I haven't replied to. I appreciate it, and I'm having trouble finding a proper response to "how was it?" besides. "It was awesome, and I'm going to do it again!" Hopefully we'll run two next year - Paris in April and New York, of course, in November. I'd like to run the NYC marathon every year that I'm physically able for the rest of my life, and I'd like to try and use a Spring marathon as an excuse to travel someplace new. No workplace can mess with that vacation reasoning - "Sorry dudes, I'm running a marathon on Sunday."

They say a post-marathon letdown is natural. Meg, Alaina and I began to think about it early last year, so it's the culmination of some pretty intense training. I have a lot of projects going on, all the time, and sadly only a few of them come front and center at any given time. Because the Marathon demands such consistency, I recommend it to anyone who wants to teach themselves how to focus better. I really believe anyone can do it.

Here comes the laundry list! Adriana's support the last six months has been awesome, and after long runs she always cooks and cares for me in a way that's been far beyond the call of duty. Meg and Alaina were perfect training partners, except for the small detail of LEAVING ME BEHIND IN NEW YORK. (just kidding). Mark, Kate and Jenny were the first peers I know who ran the marathon, so I knew that it wasn't just superpeople who could do it.

And even though she missed us, Kathryn's effort to find us was truly touching. ING and the New York Road Runner's Club should hire her as a consultant next year if they want to improve the experience of the most essential participants of the marathon - the hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers who line the streets of the city, cheering their hearts out for total strangers.

Movie Gadget Friday

Movie Gadget Friday: The Cursed Video Tape from the Ring.

You can actually make your own cursed tape, although first you’ll have to develop nensha, the ability to psychically project images of misery onto tape, or I guess, the format of your choice. No doubt we’ll see cursed DVD and cursed TiVo hard drives in the new movie, and if we’re really lucky, cursed Game Boy cartridges

Look out player haters (*looks in mirror*) - Engadget has gotten good! Who knew? I loved The Ring. Since I was little, I've always had a deep-seated fear of infinity - I used to have nightmares about huge piles of "objects" that had to be moved or sorted. Perhaps this is why I've always been driven towards computers as a hobby.

San Francisco street art - a photoset on Flickr

San Francisco street art - a photoset on Flickr.

Creaky Update!

ah! new photos.

The worst quilt in the 4H tent at the Gold Country fair. In fact the worst quilt I have ever seen. No matter your political stripe, admit it, this quilt is surpassingly bad.

That is one terrible quilt.

Veterans Day: The Things They Wrote

Link: Veterans Day: The Things They Wrote.

A year ago the Op-Ed page marked Veterans Day by publishing excerpts from letters written home by soldiers who lost their lives in Iraq. At the time, fewer than 400 Americans had died in Operation Iraqi Freedom. This year Veterans Day takes place during the battle for the Iraqi city of Falluja, where at least 11 Americans have been killed this week. Since the beginning of the war, the number of American dead in Iraq, according to the Pentagon, stands at 1,149. Thousands more have been wounded.

Below are passages from letters sent this year by men and women, now dead, to their families in the United States.

Amazon Customer Service

Amazon's Customer Service # is (800) 201-7575. For some reason this is hard to find.

nyc marathon fans of the world

nyc marathon fans of the world
Originally uploaded by anildash.

Please leave a note or comment!

Marathon Course Map

Marathon Course Map
Originally uploaded by david.

Alaina, Meg and I are going to run through New York City this Sunday. New Yorkers, we need your support! It's going to be awesome. Please leave a flickR note on the spot where you're intending to cheer and watch.

Pancake Mountain

Pancake Mountain: The Evens perform "Vowel Movement", which they wrote for Pancake Mountain.

I don't cry very often

The Door and the Orange Guy

The Door and the Orange Guy
Originally uploaded by david.

We figured out what this is - a Pumpkin Flower! Thanks Flickr.

Electronic Voting

Some friends and I have been discussing the problems with e-voting recently.

Roughly, our proposed system is a combination of the MTA Subway machines and the PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) algorithm. Have the MTA ticket machine interface designers make a super usable multi-lingual touch screen interface.

When you arrive at the polls you're ID'ed and a bar code with your "public" key is printed and handed to you. Each work station holds it's own private key which is refreshed every half hour. You scan your barcode in, vote, and you're given two print outs. Each has a barcode that's unique to your vote, and the time and place you voted. It says in huge letters 'You are voting for John Kerry, Diane Savino, Yes for open spaces in Suffolk, etc." If you made a mistake, you can re-scan your bar code (until the machine's private key is reset) and re-print your ballots. When you're done, sign one copy and hand it in. The second copy is your receipt, if you want one.

The machine has five printers and five bar code scanners built in for redundancy.

Two Late Editions of the New York Times

Two Late Editions of the New York Times
Originally uploaded by david.

Not Even the Grey Lady can keep up with the legal see-saw. I bought the "Late Edition" of the times around 7am (after voting). When I got to work, my boss said "Bummer about Ohio, huh?" After a moment of confusion we compared front pages. (Click through to Flickr to see notes on the photos)

Crazed Teacups

Crazed Teacups:

Watching a great Michael Mann movie is just like taking a night drive on the wrong side of town in an expensive car with a beautiful sound system. Drama, tension, suspicion, luxury, danger. God, I just adore them.

Bring It On, Indyvoter

Over 125 voter guides, sorted by city and written collaboratively by Indyvoter's, network of members are now on-line. This is social software with a purpose - members of the network form voting blocs to swing close elections, from city council members up to the national level.

Gotham Gazette's got a great ballot guide for New Yorkers as well. I know so many people who use  arbitrary methods to vote for the less prominent candidates on the ballot, even though these people have as much (if not more) influence on your day to day life than the national figures that only ny1 junkies know from strangers on the street. This is especially  true of judges, who rarely have a party affiliation.

So even though New York is not a swing state, our votes do matter. Jason joked about it, as did Andrea Harner: "I voted for Kerry and 15 people I know close to nothing about". The battle for the New York State Senate is going to be every bit as hard fought as the presidential race. I'm casting my vote for Diane Savino. From the NYC indyvoter guide: Labor leader! Social Worker! Diane is fighting for lower asthma rates, free clinics, youth programs in Brooklyn and limiting the over-development of Staten Island.

The Indyvoter network is awesome, but it's not 100% ready for primetime yet. My Mom, for instance, would have trouble with it and so would many of the people in my neighborhood who don't speak English or Spanish. And if they're going to truly encourage effective citizenry among people aged 16-28, Indyvoter's programmers have got to put away the RDF and get going on the Playstation port.