If anything about this is fishy it's in an arbitrary application of the right to award a do-over. Lots of close games through the years have involved mistakes of various kinds that could have, in theory, affected outcomes. The normal thought through most of my life has been "done is good" and you move on.
Henry Abbot is talking about the NBA, but he could be talking about any sport, or in fact anything.
If you're up to date, it's not a spoiler, it's a "sweetener."
8:46 I would have guessed we were 30-40 minutes behind reality - I reached for the fast forward button and was denied. We are live! How is this possible?
8:48 Jason and Anil are liveblogging too. I think it's the most self-indulgent thing a blogger can do - it's basically the blogging equivalent of the Oscars, except you are constantly giving yourself all awards.
Political Radar: Author Toni Morrison Endorses Obama:
"Nor do I care very much for your race[s]," Morrison continues to Obama, "I would not support you if that was all you had to offer or because it might make me 'proud.' "
"In thinking carefully about the strengths of the candidates, I stunned myself when I came to the following conclusion: that in addition to keen intelligence, integrity and a rare authenticity, you exhibit something that has nothing to do with age, experience, race or gender and something I don't see in other candidates. That something is a creative imagination which coupled with brilliance equals wisdom.
"Our future is ripe, outrageously rich in its possibilities. Yet unleashing the glory of that future will require a difficult labor, and some may be so frightened of its birth they will refuse to abandon their nostalgia for the womb.
"There have been a few prescient leaders in our past, but you are the man for this time," she concludes.
Ex-NYC Mayor Koch: Giuliani Acted Improperly, Looks Like A Cover-Up:
"I'm just amazed that Giuliani is doing as well as he's doing," said Koch. "He doesn't deserve it."
Fantastic post from Malcolm Gladwell about the dominance of Kenyan runners:
Here's the appropriate thought experiment. Imagine that every year 50 percent of all American 10 year old boys were shipped to Boulder Colorado, where they ran 50 to 70 miles a week at altitude for the next seven years. Would the United States regain control of international middle and long distance running?
Gladwell gets to the point fast, I like that.
I'm an unabashed fan of Gothamist's "most recommended and commented" view - it's basically Gothamist for busy people. But today's view is not good news:
Maybe it's the weather?
In an Op-Ed last Sunday by Kevin Martin, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, he proposes lifting some restrictions on media ownership which would benefit newspaper owners:
"This relatively minor loosening of the ban on cross-ownership of newspapers and TV stations in markets where there are many voices and sufficient competition to allow for new entrants would help strike a balance between ensuring the quality of local news while guarding against too much concentration."
No mention of the Internet at all, which is refreshing, but it's surprising to read a pro-media consolidation opinion in the usually lefty New York Times. Many newspapers own digital property and do very well on it, so stepping back to broadcast is counterintuitive. The thesis is that for newspapers to save themselves they need to be allowed to purchase local television stations. It's not hard to see the reverse happening, and CBS simply buying the largest newspaper in every market in which they have a local affiliate. I'm not sure that would be good for newspapers or their readers.
TEDBlog: Al Gore wins the Nobel Peace Prize:
This morning in Sweden, Al Gore and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for 2007, "for their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change."
At TED2006, Gore delivered to a rapt audience the seminal slide show that would later that year form the core of his blockbuster documentary An Inconvenient Truth. He followed it up with a second talk at the end of the conference showing ways of turning climate concern into action.
Throughout the day we'll be offering tributes to the impact of that speech on those present at TED2006 -- and the way the impact has spread throughout the world.
Peggy Noonan: I urge HuffPo readers to send in any pictures they might have or know of of presidents cracking up.
On "Blackle," the all-black homepage that purported to save energy, the Google blog says "...on flat-panel monitors (already estimated to be 75% of the market), displaying black may actually increase energy usage."
Just goes to show, the crowd is still dumb. How many people jumped at this meme?
More at The Numbers Guy and earth2tech. Earth2tech, "a publication devoted to intersection between the tech industry, their eco-moves and the next generation of tech innovation that will combat climate change" looks promising.
I usually don't blog Apperceptive work over here, but this morning Katharine Daniels, the executive editor of The Women's International Perspective Internet News Service, brought my attention to Patricia Vásquez's coverage of the the case of Haleh Esfandiari imprisonment and (supposed) confession on CNN.
Here's a short bio of Mrs. Esfandiari, excerpted from the article:
Professionally, she is Dr. Esfandiari, Director of the Middle East Program at the Woodrow Wilson International Center, who holds a Ph.D. from the prestigious University of Vienna. An exceptional scholar, she is a recipient of a MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant, given "to individuals …who show exceptional merit and promise of continued creative work." Without question, she is highly regarded by her peers. One scholar has described her as the "gold standard" of Middle East analysts.Not just a scholar but also a writer, at Princeton University Dr. Esfandiari didn’t just teach her students Persian language and literature, she taught them to love it as she did. Former students say her passion for her homeland was contagious! She taught Farsi using Persian folk tales, poetry which she effortlessly recited by heart, and old black-and-white films. She even cooked them Persian food. Before coming to the States in 1979, she worked in Iran as a young journalist for the Farsi edition of Iran's leading newspaper, Kayhan.
On Faith: Anthony M. Stevens-Arroyo: Bridging the Hitchens’ Gap.
His latest essay, stretched into book length, proposes that “religion poisons everything.” This is a valid observation only if we add the tag appropriate to an essay: “everything FOR ME.” However, adding such a qualifier would grant equal status to the opinions of most of the human race, a premise that Hitchens’ arrogance does not entertain. Hitchens never quite grasps the profundity of the Chesterton’s observation to the effect that Christianity is not so much a religion tried and found wanting as a religion that is still wanting to be tried. In arguing that religious people have spread poison he avoids applying the same criteria to professed atheists like Robespierre, Nietzsche, Pol Pot, Stalin, Jeffery Dahmer, etc. Perhaps favoritism to one’s own (Hitchens says he is an atheist) is understandable, but objectivity is preferable in pursuit of truth.
From our friends at Radar Online:
Crying wolf: Helping lead a country into a disastrous war under false pretenses got Paul Wolfowitz a cushy job atop the World Bank. Paying his girlfriend a ton of money gets him fired.
I've been going down the rabbit hole of baseball stats, scorekeeping and sports on-line.
Erik Berg's summary of SportsML, and his ongoing project to record all MLB Box Scores in XML is worth your attention.
Major League Baseball has their own undocumented but pitch-by-pitch complete xml feed of gameday news. I was hoping today's Mets/Brewers game would have projected lineups, but it's not up yet. Take a look at what they have for yesterday's game.
Scorepad offers a free trial of their scoresheet software for the Palm. I want to try this, but it looks like a little bit of a pain.
Chris Nandor's Game::Baseball::Scorecard is a free perl interface to Chris Swingle's PDF Scorecards. Chris's scorecards are the nicest I've found on-line, which may have something to do with the triangulation of his other hobbies: bookbinding, baking bread, and woodoworking.
(Thank you Alan Mitchell)
Some fantastic Bushisms from the Huffington Post:
"There Are Jobs Americans Aren't Doing…If You've Got A Chicken Factory, A Chicken-Plucking Factory, Or Whatever You Call Them, You Know What I'm Talking About"… "Everybody Wants To Be Loved...Not Everybody"… "There Are Some Similarities, Of Course [Between Iraq And Vietnam]. Death Is Terrible"… "I've Been In Politics Long Enough To Know That Polls Just Go Poof At Times"...
There's quite a kerfuffle brewing around the Apple's "inspiration" for the iPhone commercial.
We've covered this ground before, repeatedly. I'm looking forward to surveying blogistan when all is said and done to compare results and opinions.
Meanwhile - do kerfuffles brew? If not, what do they do?
Like many warm-blooded geeks, I've been thinking about the iPhone for the past week since Apple announced it. I'm kind of cool on it (more on the that later) but I'm happy people are thinking and talking about mobile, since I am obsessed with the mobile application space and I'm always happy to sit in the corner add my kibitz to the chatter.
Right now phone apps are written in Java and C libraries which differ on nearly every single make and model of phone shipped today, this makes development testing and deployment a nightmare. This why phones today do not offer a good user experience, and this is also why enterprising curious souls are attracted to the web before they are attracted to phones. I'm extremely skeptical that the iPhone runs any kind of Objective C, even Objective C 2.0 with garbage collection, as has been speculated. The overhead involved in this development makes phones feel sluggish, and it would be way too hard to support and debug over the family of processors that will run not just the iPhone family, but also the new iPods and long-rumored tablet Mac (maclet?). Javascript, CSS and XHTML all run the same on webkit, and porting webkit is easier than porting Objective-C.
There is a lot of negative buzz surrounding developers not being allowed to install applications on the iPhone, which I believe is a red herring. Developers won't be allowed to install applications, but they will be allowed to install widgets, which is just as good. Hit F12 - that's what your iPhone "dock" will look like. I've got stocks, a nice Flickr slideshow, a Vox widget, Magnolia bookmarks, package and flight tracking, and much more. It's far more useful (and beautiful) than the applications shipped with any phone today. Webkit runs greeat right now on my Nokia N731, and since it's the same webkit2, I'm sure it will run great on the iPhone.
I'll probably hold off on the iPhone for a while, since unlike Matt Haughey, I love my phone. Actually I should say "phones," since I have two: a "home" mobile (the aforementioned N73) and a "work" mobile, a Treo 700p. I love them both. The Nokia N73 has a 3+ megapixel camera, and I basically use it as a Vox appliance. Since the Vox mobile application sits at such a low level on the phone, it certainly won't work on the iPhone, which will certainly feature similarly deep iLife and .Mac integration (as it should). The Treo is basically a voice, email and calendaring appliance, and it's nearly perfect for that. Plus, it runs on Sprint's 3G network, which is lightning fast in the city.
Having said that, syncing is still the great unsolved problem for phones. It's very telling that Apple is using iTunes to sync instead of iSync, and what that basically says to me is that iSync is actually never going to get better. The Missing Sync is actually really good at syncing photos (pictures go right from the treo to iPhoto). For PC users, Lifeblog is very good at syncing pictures and text messages into a nice timeline, but it doesn't work under OS X. If Apple really, really nails this, and unifies the address book, voicemail, text messaging, picture messaging and email into a single stream that is nicely indexable and sortable, that will be a product worth looking at. But I doubt Apple will get this right, because iSync is still terrible.
1 Disclaimer: I have done some work for Nokia in the past, specifically on the Lifeblog project, and I had a wee bit of input on the way this stuff works. If not real input, at least an influence of an occasional thought by people who have real input.
2 Why is that relevant, you ask? It's the same browser, see Infoworld, Engadget, and Surfin' Safari. (Who says Apple doesn't blog?)
From Jails, Hospitals, and Hip-Hop, my man Danny Hoch and the back story on "Seinfeld", Seinfeld, Kramer and race--with a diversion into Tarantinoland.
Danny Hoch recounts meeting with the Seinfeld cast and encountering the "everyday" sort of racism that pervades our culture. In this context, Michael Richard's recent meltdown is revealed as a hair's breadth away from a much bolder sort of racism. Anil notes that the incident was a perfect storm of racial tension and disconnected cultures0.
I saw the World Premier of Jails, Hospitals and Hip-Hop on my first weekend in living in New York. At the time, I was convinced the movie I saw was going to change the world. The movie I saw never made the light of day - Rawkus, originally a co-producer on the film, pulled the music rights which forced a major re-edit of the film and (in my opinion) softened it's impact. Hoch's career (see youtube1), still impressive, was never quite the same.
0: I want to call this a "miasma," but I can't quite get the sentence right.
1: Dembot - "YouTube fills the role of that place to get prerecorded video in the same way CNN fills the role of live news... Google2 knows the value of this entry point really well, proven again by their acquisition of YouTube."
2: Tricia Wang on how Google reveals stereotypes - "I performed the original google image search just on "Asian women," "American women," and "Asian American women" for a presentation on stereotypes and identities of Asian American Youth. I want to demonstrate the pervasive stereotypes of Asian women – just how hyper-hyper sexualized they are. And it’s interesting to show that when you Google image search – there is no hierarchies of approval that the images have to go through like for traditional media (newspapers, TV shows and etc, where images usually become racialized in the approval process."
Unrelated: Google Launches transit maps in Southern California.
I never voted for anybody. I always voted against.
If you see Q-bert in Holland, now you know why.
Amy's Robot's RummyPool has a winner! "Danielle" guessed the date precisely, almost seven months in advance. Her prize is a thong.
I get a kick out of this every time I see a reference to English (British) like this. I wonder how many tatoos it would take for us to take over the Kanji alphabet as well.
DSC07757
Originally uploaded by monsteratomic.
My friend Silas posted some pictures from his trip to China.
First Day
Originally uploaded by Moon Flower.
This picture is a nice companion to The school column no one will read.
Link: The school column no one will read - Examiner.com:
All those new crayons and composition notebooks and sharpened pencils just make parents happy; they hold no magic for students, who clutch them like lifelines. They are sleep-deprived from anxiety and the knowledge that this year, at last, school will win and they will lose. Failure — this is the existential anxiety attacking eager-eyed students as they step off the school bus, all smiles, after Labor Day.
According to Michael Ruhlman, celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain is stuck in Lebanon, where he's enjoying the mojitos but still scared. Ruhlman also takes this opportunity to ruminate on the term "celebrity chef:"
Why do we have to use celebrity chef? We don’t call Wynton Marsalis the celebrity musician. We don’t refer to Annika Sorenstam as the celebrity golfer, we don’t say celebrity actor and we don’t say celebrity celebrity, though surely there are those, someone who’s famous only for being famous. As far as chefs go, are we calling them celebrity chefs to indicate they don’t cook anymore? We should consider this.
I am clearing out my Marsedit "draft" posts. Incoherence follows. As Chris says:
Away from my keyboard, I "write" exemplary posts to my mind's blog. It occurs to me that a shunt for the mentally unpublished would be nicer software for me to help build.
Hey Six Apart, get on that!
"Superman" doesn't have enough conviction or courage to be solidly square and dumb; it keeps pushing smarmy big emotions at us, but half-heartedly. It has a sour, scared undertone. And you can't help being aware that this is the sort of movie that increases the cynicism and sense of futility among actors. In order to sell the film as star-studded, a great many famous performers were signed up and then stuck in among the plastic bric-a-brac of Krypton; performers who get solo screen credits, with the full blast of trumpets and timpani, turn out to have walk-ons. Susannah York is up there as the infant Superman's mother, but, though Krypton is very advanced, this mother seems to have no part in the decision to send her baby to Earth. York has no part of any kind; she stares at the camera and moves her mouth as if she'd got a bit of food stuck in a back tooth. Of all the actors gathered here—all acting in different styles—she, maybe, by her placid distaste, communicates with us most directly.
Pauline Kael's review of Superman could have been written about nearly any blockbuster between then and now, and indeed she wrote this message into her reviews and reviews over and over. Today Kael looks like a literary giant next to the numbskulls currently reviewing films for the The New Yorker, but here she is simply dead wrong. The original Superman is a masterpiece. (Via kottke.)
Neither your friend nor your boss will be impressed when you quote [Oscar] Wilde. Yet he has yet another one-liner to describe this process: “Morality, like art, means drawing a line someplace.” Asking students to draw the line was my lesson plan.
From a nice post by my Mom about a presentation she gave to other English teachers this month.
Nicolas Nova's essay "Guy Debord and how IT renews the urban experience" is an uneven but worthy read.
Rebecca has been compiling summer reading lists. They're all worthy, but the Interaction Design summer reading list caught my attention.
KRS One has a myspace page.
Bill "Spaceman" Lee, on when he hurt his elbow once and was given drugs by the Red Sox:
They're going, 'Here, take this, take this, take this.' Afterwards, I've got sterazolidin, butazolidin, Clenerol, Indicin. I've got everything in me. I can pitch in the American League, but I couldn't run in the Kentucky Derby. Holy cow, I'm glowing in the dark. Now all of a sudden (current players) are doing it on their own and now it's a crime?!
That's a quote from the Baseball Prospectus' 5000th article, a landmark worthy of note from the best sports site on the Internet. Bill Lee also said:
The other day they asked me about mandatory drug testing. I said I believed in drug testing a long time ago. All through the sixties I tested everything.
This should give you an idea of how dramatically the discussion around drugs in Baseball has shifted.
Finally, ramps pizza at Otto's.
The working-class London borough of Hackney is furious that Nike is selling t-shirts with the Hackney logo without asking for permission to use (much less license) the decades-old icon. In keeping with their act first, act later practice, Nike has agreed to discuss the issue with Hackney.
Stay Free! brings us another Nike kerfuffle, "Just Coopt it."
I'm sure this story will follow a similar arc as the Minor Threat "controversy" (see kottke, torrez, me, mike, mike again, and anil) - debate among bloggers, coverage in alternative weeklies, GIF apology.
Chimpanzee Media Monitoring (really!) were the first to blog the story, and you can read the statement from the Mayor of Hackney. The Hackney city council is asking for financial reparations to fund sports activity, and assurances that the clothes were not produced in sweatshops.
I wonder if it's too late for the District of Columbia to argue that Minor Threat (and by extension, Dischord Records) is a local treasure. Reparations should be paid to local musicians and educational programs.
I've been off-blog for a couple of days, so apologies if I'm late to this surely-hot story. CNN reports on Baghdad ER: "HBO documentary could trigger stress disorder."
Kiley said military medical treatment facilities should be ready to help troops and family members affected by the film. He suggested that mental health facilities should extend their treatment hours and reach out to the troops proactively.Army officials said they fully support the film and note the Army gave the filmmakers access to the hospital. But privately they said it is so graphic that senior leaders do not want to turn Monday's premiere in Washington into a social occasion so many will not be attending, preferring to let the limelight fall on the military personnel.
Wow, if a documentary can do all that, imagine what war could do. Bob Herbert (whose opinion is locked behind the New York Times' editorial firewall) said that the film should be required viewing for all Americans, and also that the film wasn't pro-war or anti-war. I find it hard to reconcile these two comments, since Herbert (whose opinion I hold in high regard) is so staunchly anti-war, and a couple of letters to the editor in the Times agree with me on this point.
You can read more about Baghdad ER at HBO's own site, a New York Times article about Army officers skipping (not boycotting) screenings of the film and this US News & World Report interview with Merrit Pember, who is one of the featured surgeons in the film.
Jason linked to an NPR interview with David Remnick, the Editor-in-Chief of The New Yorker. It's notable because it's the first time I've ever heard or read anyone take Remnick to task for his pro-war stance in the run-up to the Iraq war.
Remnick hems and haws and says "No one got the story quite right." This is one of the most enraging cop-outs that I hear reported over and over as an excuse for the press' total lack of spine and vision last year. I wish Remnick would simply apologize, which is clearly the right thing to do. There's more shame in not owning up to your mistakes than in admitting them. It seems like a minor point, but I naively hold the magazine to a higher standard.
I know Art Spiegelman left The New Yorker largely because of this issue, and now I see he's doing covers for Harper's, which seems silly and derivative. All in all it's just a minor footnote to this whole sad episode.
The Apple fan community (mob?) is whipped into a tizzy over this bootleg "G6" being sold with a pirated version of OS X for Intel. I don't get the animosity. This thing looks pretty cool to me. This is probably exactly what a low-end Mac would look like if Steve Jobs hadn't put the kibosh (kibbosh?) on clones when he came back to Apple.
I'm still waiting for the "Google OS" to to emerge in a similar manner, which could simply be a nice Ubuntu box with the Google bookmarks and APIs baked into Gnome.
Why God made the Portuguese
Originally uploaded by Mike Monteiro.
I almost asked about this at Chipotle today, and then decided not to.
Meg's been following the growing movement against Foie Gras and yesterday noted PETA's heavy handed tactics in getting the legislation passed. I'm a strong advocate of animal rights, but I'm definitely no fan of PETA. Often people hate PETA so much they lose the ability to think critically about animal rights. PETA is the far right of the left. I love Meg's idea about creating laws to encourgae the humane treatment of animals modeled after organic certification.
I'm suspicious of Foie Gras' current status as a cause celebré. It reminds me of recycling's role in the environmental movement - it makes people feel active and progressive, but only in rare cases does the act of recycling encourage conservation and smart reuse. We're just doing free labor for waste management companies.
updates:
Turns out the US Navy is the iRobots' largest customer. I'm not surprised or particularly worried, but it's a funny juxtaposition with some other news today: US government "intelligence" is investigating Lenovo for fear that "Lenovo [could] equip its PCs so that the U.S. can be spied on." Too bad the TALON doesn't dust surfaces, because then the military industrial complex would pwn my home even more than it already does.
You can read more about iRobot godfather Isaac Asimov over on the occasionally updated snarkout.org.
Which robot do you fear more? Thinkpad or Roomba?
"Our current focus is to drive like hell … and try to get [Spirit] to safe winter havens before the power situation gets really bad," said Steve Squyres, lead Mars Rover Exploration scientist at Cornell University.
Spirit is trying to get to safe ground before the Mars Winter, so its solar plates can keep it chugging along until next year. The Mars Rovers were supposed to have been long since broken down and left for dead by now, so of course this is an eventuality that Spirit was not designed for. Good luck, my rover friend!
Opportunity is out of danger, apparently on the other side of Mars. In my dreams I see them driving side by side, not on opposite sides of the planet.
The Mars Rovers have even outlasted the Space.com "Best of Mars Rover" images site, which appears broken. You can still view their top 20 rated Mars Rover images, but that's all for now, maybe until the Apache winter is over.
CNN.com: "Federal judge says he will require Google to turn over some data to Department of Justice."
Amazon.com: "Amazon S3 provides a simple web services interface that can be used to store and retrieve any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere on the web."
A distributed, encrypted backup would get a lot of traction right now. Something like like duplicity or boxbackup but baked into the Operating System at the filesystem level. Sure, it's hard, but having no control over what the government does with your email, pictures and movies is even harder.
Just when I thought Time Warner had given me the greatest gift they could possibly give me - New York 1 on Demand - my old favorite CNN raises the bar with this article that suggests that the local danger at our ports (corrupt port managers, the mob) may be as dire as the external (arab terrorists). This is Sopranos 101, people. And where are my "Arab-based ports company" email alerts?
Around 2/3rs of CNN readers are more scared of the Mob than the Arabs. Fine. I wish CNN's little social experiment was a little more controlled. What if CNN took it to the next level and offered a simlar poll item next to every piece of contraversial or bad news they posted on their web site? "Who would you rather go on a hunting trip with, Dick Cheney or the US-based mafia?" "Who would you rather host the Oscars, Jon Stewart or the US-based mafia?" and so on.
My dreams are answered
Originally uploaded by david.
I like to watch The Wire, Deadwood and whatever's playing on New York 1. Customers of Time Warner Cable can now get NY1 on demand, as if it wasn't already convenient enough that they replay every story every hour.
Anil jokingly calls NY1 "The Subway Strike Channel." I'm not laughing! As gothamist and others (including the New York Times, but behind their paywall) noted, NY1's strike coverage was unrivaled. If they offered a "Best of the 2005 Subway Strike Coverage" DVD for $30, I'd buy it. I am hoping for another strike this year, even though I know that's impossible, just so NY1 can cover it again.
James Wolcott: The Red and the Black:
V for Vendetta may be--why hedge? is--the most subversive cinematic deed of the Bush-Blair era, a dagger poised in midair. Unlike the other movies dubbed "Controversial" (Fahrenheit 9-11, The Passion, Munich, Syriana), it doesn't play to a particular constituency or polarized culture bloc, it's working on a deeper, Edger Allen Poe-ish witch's brew substrata of pop myth."
More or less exactly what I wanted to hear. Thanks, Tom Moody.
In exceptional circumstances, graphics from other news sites sneak into the Best of CNN series. This is one such circumstance.
Look at those beautiful bars. Does that count as desecrating the flag? (Yes.)
Earlier this month Mr. Sun gave me a top compliment: "I read a bunch of [hello, typepad] posts and I know a lot of things he likes and not much about what he hates. That's nice." Thank you, Mr. Sun. When the giver of life (and lyric) compliments you for being positive, you run with it.
I've been reblogging quite a bit (last Tuesday was a highlight), but it doesn't take the place of regular old blogging, so I'm going to try and pick up the pace again. This last week was full of drama (Sudama - was it the stars?) but I was struck by the good, rather than the bad, behavior of folks on the Internet.
Rogers Cadenhead stepped into a snake pit of xml pedantry and nearly a decade of failed ideas and nasty politics, in hopes of making software better. Some people in the tech community grouse about the "back channel" and then send private email messages around trying to intimidate people out of their ideas. These same people call for the end of venture capital as we know it, and then lean on friendly investors to lay out even more dire threats. Rogers' responses have been measured and reasonable. I trust him and the rest of the RSS advisory board to make software better.
In a similar vein, my friend Judith lost her camera in Hawaii. When Canadian tourists stumbled upon it, they did the right thing by alerting the park ranger, but then did the wrong thing by telling Judith they were not going to return it. Judith knows their name, phone number and address, but has refused to release that information even to the press. She could have their names dragged through the mud - honestly, she could probably have their house burned to the ground in twenty minutes - but instead she is patiently plodding through legal channels hoping the family decides to do the right thing. If you have something that's not yours you return it, right?
And finally, my friend Jason Kottke ended his year long micropatronage experiment. Jason's design and content is the gold standard of weblogs, and has been for years.
At some point last year I was sitting near Jason at Eyebeam, and he offered to show me some ideas he was working on for kottke.org. He opened up a photoshop document, and proceeded to zoom through 15-20 different styles and color schemes. The layouts were all top notch, obviously, but I was most struck by the thoroughness and level of detail in his own mockups. The layers were all logically named and grouped, so he could fly through ideas almost as fast as he could talk about them. If you know photoshop well, you know what I'm talking about.
It was really at that moment I realized how seriously Jason took his work - here was a document that less than five or ten people would even see or know existed, but it was of a higher quality than 95% of the work that professional web designers hand over to their clients. Jason took an enormous pay cut last year in hopes of making his blog better, a great gift to his readers. I think he succeeded, albeit maybe not at to the lofty levels he set for himself. I am sure kottke.org will continue to be outstanding, and I'm looking forward to reading it.
People like Rogers, Judith and Jason that make the Internet great.
textually.org has been on fire recently. If you like cell phones & mobile technology, be prepared to lose your afternoon! Some highlights: San Jose art museum to offer guided tours over cell phones, library reminders over sms, man's corpse phones home (as his coffin was being lowered into the ground!), sms boom leads to digit damage (3.8 million people now complain of text-related injuries every year!), Prague hospital announces death by SMS, and mcomic makes it easy for independent comics to distribute their work over SMS.
Imapix at Work
Originally uploaded by lefion.
Inspired by the US team's curling success, surveying work has begun on a curling ice in Prospect Park, hopefully to be finished before next winter.
Roger Ebert - Dwarfs, Little People and the M-Word (xhtml)
I am an actor that you have reviewed neither favorably nor unfavorably in two different movies: one was "Death to Smoochy," the other "Things You Can Tell Just By Looking At Her." I have absolutely no objection to you trashing a film or lauding it. I do object to the use of the word 'midgets' in your review of "Death to Smoochy."
Too lazy/busy to blog today, so I offer you this classic Roger Ebert meditation on height and bigotry.
OMG shirt
Originally uploaded by Mike Monteiro.
I recommend the purchase of this shirt, with apologies to my more sensitive readers.
"Hey, Idiots! It's a film about race made in 1968! Of COURSE it shows up next to MLK in searches. Nosy reporters: get back to the wiretapping story. Bloggers: Typepad has been up for two whole weeks straight! Now let us get back to the Mary-Kate and Ashley line. kthxbye!!!"
happy new year
Originally uploaded by david.
I'm ending this year happier and more content than I started it. All in all, a success. I feel great about the relationships in my life and work, and I'm enthusiastic for the new year. Some of my ambitions for this blog haven't come to fruition, but I think they will in 2006.
In the spirit of holiday giving, here are all my open tabs with commentary. I'll start with what I think are my smartest comments, so when you get bored you can just stop reading.
Of all the "2006 predictions" I've read, none of them have much to do with the one laptop per child initiative. If it's even one quarter as successful as it is ambitious, it's going to change the face of the education forever. Counter-intuitively, it's going to make Google even more powerful than Yahoo and Microsoft, since Google is stronger in infrastructure and internationalization than it's competitors. It's also going to force a real business model to emerge around micropayments, since that's more in tune with the way third world economies already operate. Also, Google's Blogger is still the best completely free blogging option.
I'm reblogging at Eyebeam for the next couple of weeks. (Thanks for the kind words, Michael.) I love Eyebeam, and their projects. Part of my motivation for becoming a consultant was so that I could carve out more time to explore the more creative side of computer science, and Eyebeam's doing some of the best work out there right now. Reblogging makes reading and writing easier, which is the essence of blogging. And please submit links if there's anything you think I should see.
My buddy Charlie wonders if is Google behind T-mobile's Web 'n' Walk. My answer "it doesn't matter." Check out Christian Lindholm's remote (mobile???) contribution to Les Blogs 2.0:
The mobile industry is in a stalemate. The handset vendors are desperately trying to escape the “phone” legacy, a wonderful legacy in many ways, but the mobile phone we all love to talk on is perfected.
I've been playing around with the N70 and N90 a bit - and they are phenomenal phones. I didn't think the phone experience could get much better, but Nokia really nailed the details in a way they haven't done in a long time. But going forward, the real innovations are going to come from devices like the Nokia 770, which is one iteration away from challenging the low-end laptop market. I'm not sure if Lenovo, Nokia, Apple or wal-mart are going to get there first, but someone is. In two years we'll all be carrying around an iPod, a 770-like tablet, and a Nokia N-series style phone.
I was going to reblog unmediated's pointer to the flickr mobile API how-to. Then I realized they reblogged it out of MY delicious links. Talk about a closed loop
I'd buy the new ReadyMade book in a heartbeat, but there's a new order on our bookshelves - for us to buy a new book we have to read a book AND reduce another book. There are some low hanging fruit (Lego Mindstorms manual, old textbooks) but it's going to be a challenge. But hopefully Adriana and I can do some good book blogging this year.
Jason's lists of the best links of the year and the rest of the best more than justify my micropatron dollars, not that he had to justify anything. This is the kind of idea that crosses a lot of people's minds but no one finishes the job quite like Kottke.
In Steal from Google, a Businessweek columnist proposes that local newspapers should try and saturate the print market the same way google did the on-line space, by giving away ad space for virtually nothing to build eyeballs. The difference is, newspapers don't have built in search, the number of "eyeballs" in a few zip codes is limited, and the cost of paper is going up, while the cost of servers is going down.
Stale tabs I meant to spend more time with but probably won't: thoughts on Language Design, complete list of delicious tools, and yet another way to annotate images with CSS. (Now they're closed. Buh-bye!)
Fetching tags produces funny little tags for your dog. And people say our economy is hurting. The dooce claims Salma Hayek doesn't exercise, she just takes multi-vitamins. No way.
I was going to cut my hair, but now that Andy Samberg is hitting it big I'm going to let it grow out.
Looks like David Rees may have a little bit of writer in him after all. His piece on D. Boon is pitch perfect.
Transport Workers Union, Local 100 has a blog. Right now they're using it as a backup for their "real" site and to cut and paste press releases, but I'd be interested to see if they expand their content as the week goes on.
Today's Rocketboom is pretty exciting. Camera "2" is back!
we make money not art returns to form with Architecture for bicycles and Video-game rapid prototyping
The first fiction collection on Lulu that I actually think I'm going to buy: How to Leave a Place by Ariel Gore. (PubSubbing Erik Benson - you are going to like this too)
U.S. President George W. Bush shakes hands with Albert Hubo (robot). Apparently there are some bones from eyebeam in that skeleton.
Jeff Chang is Still Recovering From Hurricane Meters. I didn't even know they were touring! I'm a shadow of my former self (as I listen to a "leaked" copy of Shakira's new CD (I love it)).
And since I've got to have some vitamin geek in this post, here's John Siracusa on consumer RAID options and filesystem architecture. (Mom: He's worried about Dad's iMac crashing and losing all of Lauren's photos. So am I, but I'm not that worried. If we lose the photos, we lose them, right?)
Photographed as it rested in the dry mud next to Fats Domino's abandoned house, the one he was rescued from, in the devastated Ninth Ward of New Orleans: a clock.
I won't thumbnail ("excerpt") the photos here, because they should be experienced in the manner Clayton intended. If you aren't subscribed to the Operation Eden feed and you enjoy great photography, I offer my highest recommendation.
Clayton Cubit, author of the exceptional New Orleans photoblog Operation Eden, was married yesterday in the french quarter.
I'm Mobile, that is, on this Monday. And I'm still thinking about mobile apps and ideas even though I'm blogging less and my blog is still broken. (Note to future readers - my blog WAS broken at the time of writing).
