hello, typepad

Happy New Year!

flickrimage
Originally uploaded by sudama.

I'll be offline for a week.

Vacation Time!

25 seconds to write the program, 5 seconds to mess it up with a typo, and 5 minutes to track down the problem. Finn calls this "classic development debug cycle." I call it "time for a few days off."

Booty Call

Booty Call
Originally uploaded by david.

That's some drink. Although it wasn't captured in the picture above, the price of the Booty Call was $2.50. I asked what was in the Booty Call, and our waitress said "No more Booty Call."

Finn's Thoughts on Puppet Sex

finn:

If 2004 is The Year Puppet Sex Broke, then it must be time for people to start decrying the current popular crop as ripoffs of the superior originals. Let me be the first to do so by recommending the 1976 film Let My Puppets Come, from the director of Deep Throat and The Devil In Miss Jones. And proving that having a pupet sex movie in your filmography can lead to future Oscar gold is Meet the Feebles from 1989, which was directed by Peter Jackson of Lord of the Rings fame.

(Via randomWalks comments.)

Jenny's New Job

iPalimpsest: YA librarian.

I just found out that I'm going to be a YA librarian at the Fort Washington branch of the NYPL. This is quite a departure for me from teaching adults to use computers

Good luck Jenny!

TeacherTalk: A Schizophrenic Christmas

TeacherTalk: A Schizophrenic Christmas.

At this time of year, I suffer from multiple personality disorder. I am part mother, wife, and teacher---my usual full-time occupations.

    But I am also my own mother, preparing homemade caramels. And Martha Stewart, getting out the perfect serving platters for the perfect dinner party.

    I am June Cleaver, who never breaks a sweat while cooking. (Did she ever cook?)

    And, lastly, I am Carrie Bradshaw, clicking away on my Apple laptop, making deadline on my column.

    Yet why does it seem that everyone else in my life has only one personality?

My Mom started a blog this year.

Mindshare

kottke says:

Meg, Ev, Paul Bausch, Ben, and Mena are PC Magazine's People of the Year,  Recognized for something called "blogging".

Pat Riley once observed that as Michael Jordan's legend grew his name shrunk - from Michael Jordan, to Michael (temporarily causing a cultural logjam with "The Gloved One"), to Mike (thanks, Gatorade), before finally settling down at "MJ." The Washington Post referred to him briefly as "M" during his ill-fated stint with the Wizards, but it didn't stick. I bring this up because I call "Paul Bausch" "pb," even though I've only met him a few times. He never scored a double nickel in The Garden, but he did invent the permalink.

Thanks to Google Suggest, we have a whole new way to think about the alphabet. A is for Amazon, not Apple. Will this replace the NATO Phonetic Alphabet, which was "developed in the 1950s to be intelligible and pronounceable to all NATO allies in the heat of battle"? Fifty years later, the Google Alphabet suggests a different set of priorities: Paris Hilton, Tara Reid, Verizon and Zip Codes.

I enjoyed a brief stay as the #1 David Jacobs, but I'm humbled to occupy second place heading into the new year.

Social Software and 43 Things, Twinkler, Hugster

Link: learn python on 43 Things, Twinkler.

Link: dj's progress on Become a better programmer on 43 Things, Hugster.

Link: Anil Dash: Netflix Friends.

As Anil says, social software is a feature, not an application.  43things and flickr are so focused on adding features, it's exhilirating to watch (really). But is there no migration from twinkler to hugster, and when is someone going to use the flickR API (*) to correlate accomplished tasks with visual conversation? I've heard rumors of an API for upcoming, can we connect events from upcoming to pictures from those events on flickr, to milestones being met on 43things?

update, after spending a few more minutes with hugster. The first thing I do is race through to-do lists adding items to my own, (and presumably, robbing my future self from time I certainly don't have). This reminds me of what I call "the flickr point," the moment at which people upload large batches of their old photos to flickr, instead of using it as a temporary storage place for cameraphone photos. This suggests a benchmark for maturity in social software, when social software's primary use is actually getting somethind done, like listing photos (visual conversations) or to-do entries (global priorities) rather than assembling a prestigious "friends" portfolio.

This is not all good, as it also creates what I call "the chore". "The chore" envelopes all the time I've spent managing the physical and virtual junk I've accumulated through my own life. "The chore" is exacerbated by my OCD tendencies. "The chore" includes, but is not limited to:

• Moving. I hate moving. I'm very happy we have an affordable, spacious apartment, even though it's twenty minutes farther from Manhattan's center than I'd like it to be.


• Sorting Books, or splitting what was once one shelf or topic into two shelves or topics.


• After buying a new CD, resorting your CD book in alphabetical order. This necessitates moving every CD in the book one or two sleeves over. (This chore is obsolete)


• Deleting duplicate songs in iTunes.


• Consolidating iPhoto libraries.


• (coming soon) Consolidating hello, eyeballs photo libraries and making flickr and typepad's photo albums play nice.


• Using Applescript to forward and auto-label my old email folders into gmail. (in two years, gmail is going to be in wider use than outlook, that's a no brainer)


• Catching all Pokémon.

*Mom: an API allows websites to compare, sync and exchange data automatically

Jiiiha!

Jiiiha! 
Originally uploaded by Bummelisa.

 

Morning Foxy

Morning Foxy 
Originally uploaded by pachanga.

 

A Day Without a Mexican - La Movie

California is in shock. The economic, political and social implications of this disaster threaten the Golden State’s way of life. We delve into the lives of four characters: Mary Jo Quintana, teacher and housewife; Senator Abercrombie, suddenly upgraded to Governor; Louis Mcclaire, ranch owner and agribusiness representative; and Lila Rodriguez, reporter and apparently the only Latina left behind. For all of them, “the disappearance” forces the cracks in their private lives wide open.

A Day Without a Mexican - La Movie.

"I was waiting for my car to be washed, and this guy handed me a tip," says Sergio Arau. "In a restaurant someone heard me speaking Spanish and asked me to bring water. I'd say to myself, Do I look like I work here?"

A well-known journalist, cartoonist, animator, musician and film and video director in Mexico City, Arau was used to being viewed as a serious professional. So it was a shock to discover how little his resume counted in the U.S.

"What happened?" asks Arau. "I had a long career before I came here, and because I didn't speak English, for the first time in my life I was a minority. No one knew or cared about the work I had done. What's worse, they didn't even see me."

Filmmaker Sergio Arau profile at Apple.com.

Happy Birthday Milla Jovovich

Milla Jovovich is 29 years old today. To celebrate, here's her chart topping single "Sweetheart."

What it Means to be a New Yorker

And you truly become a New Yorker when the city seems more to you than your workplace and a collection of shops and restaurants, when you start caring about the city itself, beyond your daily route, outside of your neighborhood, about the city we were and the city we might become. You know you're a New Yorker when you know what kind of city we are. No one can tell you this, it just becomes a fact of your life.

I like MUG's description of what it means to be a New Yorker. I also like Flickr's related tags:

Related: newyork, subway, brooklyn

See also: manhattan, rnc, night, art, centralpark, building, new, architecture, york, protest, food

It's not an elegant definition, but it's revealing to see how New Yorkers share and how we define ourselves.

Speaking of The Sun...

The new Get Your War On is great.

 

Personal Style

Twin Peaks References

Episode 6 (1006) [07/23/93]:

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Yet there are those who open many eyes. Eyes are the mirror of the soul, someone has said. So we look closely at the eyes to see the nature of the soul.

Sometimes when we see the eyes--those horrible times when we see the eyes, eyes that ... that have no soul--then we know a darkness, then we wonder: where is the beauty? There is none if the eyes are soulless.

Log Lady Transcripts.

The Sun

Thanks to Anil, the song of the week is The Sun by Ghostface Killer, Raekwon, Slick Rick and the RZA. I couldn't believe that I didn't have this song on mp3 or vinyl, but I was able to find the track on J-Love's Best of Slick Rick Volume 2, which I bought at one of the three (3!) hip-hop piracy closets within 100 yards of my workplace.

Next up, the original version of Flowers.

Barry Bonds, Steroids, and Hypocrisy

Although the San Francisco Chronicle broke the story (probably the law as well, since Grand Jury testimony is supposed to stay confidential), the New York Times has been leading the charge to take down Bonds and Giambi for their alleged violations.

Steroid Revelations Hardly Considered Surprising.

John Hoberman, a University of Texas professor who has written extensively about performance-enhancing drugs, recommends a renunciation of athletes as role models and an emphasis on intramural and club sports, which are devoted to the joys of participation and the improvement of public health.

I couldn't agree more. I find the pursuit of sport immensely satisfying, whether it's pickup basketball, running, cycling or Sunday softball. I love the gradual improvement, running farther, getting leaner, and the camraderie of my friends. On the topic of role models, my own running partners are as good as anyone's I would wager, and I think I can safely say that aside from the clear air of Alaina's California, none of us are ingesting performance enhancing chemicals.

But the level of hypocrisy surrounding this debate, amidst calls to suspend or ban players, is insane. Bonds, Sheffield and Giambi and all other Major League players were gifted with skill and had to develop nearly unfathomable discipline to perform at the elite level of professional sport. The late great Ralph Wiley once said:

There is nothing, absolutely nothing on this green earth that you can eat drink, sniff, inject or rub on yourself that can make you hit 700 home runs in the Show. That product exists only in our collective imagination, and if he did drink the spiked Kool-Aid, so to speak, this would include Bonds.

Because if that were the case, in spite of all the "outrage," bottles of the stuff would be getting knocked back by just about everybody. People who are currently "outraged" would not only use it, they'd have their kids on it.

Amen. He also said:

Why is it when NFL football players are shot up in their ankles and calves and knees and rib cages and shoulders and necks with pain-killers to numb themselves and then go out and sacrifice their damaged limbs so they can perform for us, we have no outrage over that?

Why indeed. I'm sure that the NFL and NBA will also come under pressure to test their players for steroids. What about runners who train at high distances, thinning their blood and improving it's ability to deliver oxygen to muscles? Should we dynamite the mountain passes in Africa where elite marathoners shave those last seconds off of each mile? Why stop at sports? Should those who have used Viagra stop having sex? What about bored surbanites who dropped acid - can we revoke their right to imagination? High Schoolers get prescriptions to calm them into "attention," and don't get me started on the percentage of our produce that is genetically modified or the pesticides and steroids that find their way into our bellies via meat, dairy and fish.

Of course, I'll be sad if it turns out Serena Williams, Lance Armstrong, Rasheed Wallace, Jason Kottke, Mike Piazza or one of my other favorite athletes are guilty of tilting the playing field, but I don't think it's earth shattering, especially in a culture as chemical dependent as ours.

Nokia phones in their condoms

Hello_02.jpg
Originally uploaded by david.

Walking through Brooklyn Chinatown tonight, we popped into a few phone stores to see the new holiday season's importants from Japan and Hong Kong. One of them was the Nokia 7260. It's significantly lighter and slimmer than the Nokia 3650 or 7610, and in person it's actually pretty cool looking. It also features "Clothing and shoe size converter for the true fashionista" and an FM Radio. It doesn't have bluetooth, a megapixel camera, or a memory card slot, so I wasn't that interested, but I still asked how much it was. Totally unlocked, it was $250, or $80 if I was willing extend my contract with T-mobile.

But T-mobile is apparently cracking down on phone switchers - they only want to give the free phones to people switching into their service, not existing customers. So to get the cheap rate on this phone, I would have had to change my phone number and register the phone under a fake name. Huh? The woman behind the counter assured me "We do this all the time, it's easy!" Okay.