hello, typepad

11/12ths of Apperceptive

11/12ths of Apperceptive
Originally uploaded by capndesign.

My First Kottke

kottke.org, circa late 1999
Originally uploaded by jkottke.

I'd like a "single service site" that just let you log in and pick which kottke.org version was your first or favorite.

Ursus maritimus (Polar Bear) - a photoset on Flickr.

Design Your Life:

John Emerson, Principal at Apperceptive LLC, has just released a free brochure advising non-profits on how to use information design. Design steps up as both an art of rhetoric -- how can you use design to tell a story and promote a cause? -- and a tool of analysis: how can information graphics help you analyze data, make a plan, and clarify your ideas?

These two “mistranslations” are part of a larger project that consists of translating (or rather, mistranslating) poems from languages I do not know well or at all (in this case, Russian and Hungarian).

Re-elect Clay Davis

Re-elect Clay Davis Shirt #2
Originally uploaded by Mike Monteiro.

Robin Chase at TED

Robin Chase's talk about the future of transportation, the environment, and the Internet was my favorite talk at TED last year. Yes, that's one talk!

9:58p The Plane Takes Off (via kottke)

Poor Lady L

Poor Lady L
Originally uploaded by david.

-----
http://apperceptive.com

This One Doesn't Go to Eleven

Guitar Hero is a solid gold hit; a sell-out across all major gaming platforms with a booming ebay/craigslist trade emerging for guitars sans game. I enjoyed a perfect song recently, and I was rewarded with 5 embossed gold stars. But this got me thinking... I hate gold stars! Unfortunately I kept thinking.

I love Sonic Youth and The Stone Roses, but much of the game "play" feels like a chore. Shouldn't I be able to make my own playlist, instead of slogging through a music selection geared for alternateens? It's an mp3 and a guitar tab, it should be trivial to roll your own. With the Wii selling nearly two million units a month, and many of those sales ending up in the hands of older gamers (all the way up to retirement homes), there needs to some diversity in the musical selection and avatars.

The game also punishes you for improvisation - it's DDR in a guitar neck. This is the third iteration in the Guitar Hero series, and Mario and Katamari have shown us how satisfying games can be when you remove walls - shouldn't a game whose heart is live performance do the same? Instead we're mindlessly mashing buttons. We may as well be cup stacking. There's also a second level of performance in video games when playing games in a social setting. For spectators, there's absolutely no visual interest in following the action, unless you need a headache.

Guitar Hero is exhilarating and addictive because listening to music is fantastic. Considering this, it's remarkable that the music industry has still managed to paint themselves into a corner they probably won't get out of. There's a tremendous opportunity for music technology that breaks in instead of breaking down the more you experience it.

Musings on Examiner comments on my column:

For the past few months, readers have been encouraged to comment on Examiner stories and columns. On the whole, I find the comments on my Monday Education column positive and intelligent. There is also an "agree/disagree" option for readers of the comments.

However, sometimes either the comments or the "agree/disagree" clicks are mystifying. On the very first comment I received, for instance, a reader commented on my column on the Virginia Tech shootings that my column inspired hope without trivializing the disaster. Since its posting, more than three hundred readers have clicked, in nearly equal numbers, that they agreed or disagreed with this comment.

I really don't quite understand what those clicks mean. The reader was reacting to the column. Did "disagree" mean that my column didn't inspire hope? Or that the event itself was too horrible to inspire hope?

My Mom has an on-line community! Cool, right?

Stingy Kids:

I was thrilled to learn this week that the poet, translator, and publisher Peter Cole was the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship (otherwise known as "the genius grant")

TeacherTalk: What I Didn't Do This Summer.

Perhaps all professions dwell on the negative. The waitstaff at a restaurant probably worries about customers who are not being served efficiently more than they think about tables where the service has been good. Managers fret about the weak links on their team and often take for granted the players who do everything right. It’s easy to find fault with what we’ve done, and much harder to see the good in what we do. We appreciate compliments because we don’t give them to ourselves, so someone else has to do it.

And so I find myself near the beginning of the school year, nervous about all I wish I had read and planned, yet knowing that I’m probably as ready for my 150 charges as I’ll ever be. And, even though they don’t know it yet, they are ready for my class as well. No more Sunday night nerves—it’s Monday morning. Time to move forward, positively.

Paul Greenberg writes:

In case you're interested, I have a couple of pieces in today's Times:

A short food piece in the Times Magazine on small, local salmon operations in Alaska

A back page essay in the Book Review on Ernest Hemingway and his effect on the big pelagic fish like tuna and marlin

There's also an interview with me on the NY Times Book Review's podcast about the Hemingway piece.

Dear Ocean

aP1030237
Originally uploaded by Steve1949.

Shadow's holding down the fort this Summer, I'll see you next Summer.

"Like a Parchment"

The vertical content layout quickly results in a cluttered, sluggish page.

You Might Be A Teacher If...

Tomorrow’s world needs today’s teachers, and that pool is growing smaller. Every one of our children has had a weak teacher along the way, one who sends home messages that are either grammatically incorrect, or hostile in tone. If you cringe at the thought of your child spending a year in a weak teacher’s classroom, you just might be a teacher.

If you haven't been reading Stingy Kids, you're missing out on some great blogging.

• Music critic "Rhythmik" offers his critique of the Washington Post's Joshua Bell experiment:

  So the Washington Post attempted to essentially make fools of the general public, mind you the music listening public, modern day American culture, and in the end Joshua Bell concert ticket holders. I think that all they succeeded in doing was waking up the classical/serious music world to their own ignorance rather than waking us up to ours. In “an unblinking assessment of public taste…would beauty transcend?” I ask, should it?

• In When Gabo met Shakira, Adriana exposes the Guardian UK's 2002 "translation," of Gabriel García Márquez's famous 1999 article about the artist. "The Guardian reworking of this article is analogous to carving a Speedo onto Michelangelo's David because to do so would be more in keeping with today's fashion."
• Basics Made New, because that's a great link too.

Blog All Open Tabs

Thank you, Adam, for the note,. In the meantime, Google Reader has become the theoretical "all open tabs," and it does a pretty good job! Along with a bunch of other reBlog improvements (releasing soon), dj.riceweevil is back, archives too (and they're here to stay.)

The Brooklyn Botanical Garden has a live cherry blossom map. Via Andrea.

Candidates for Miss Landmine. Via Tricia, via Dav ("An odd way to bring about awareness of post-war landmine casualties."), via me, somehow.

Second Avenue Subway wishlist. ADM comments: "that sliding door idea is really funny. just one more surface to get tagged, nutra-lifed, acid-etched, and phlegmy."

Residents of Roosevelt Island want an escape... staircase. We'll see how that works in a crisis. Via Gothamist.

Bid on Senator Kerry's almost-was iPod to raise awareness for Creative Commons.

Google launchs MyMaps.

"Everyone looks all geeky and not self-conscious and not trying to look cool. Everyone was kind of jumping around. No one knew how to dance." - Henry Rollins, from Punk Love over at Radar.

Major Redux Redux

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?

Sudama gets the golden helicopter for his observation that "twitter is teh social pocket. pocket is teh 0sil8 kottke did in June 2001."

Twitter should borrow pocket's terms of service:

Are you going to use my phone number for bad things?

Absolutely not. I will not call your phone. I will not give your number to anyone. I will not sell your number to anyone. I will not write your number in a bathroom stall preceded by the words "for a good time call". The only thing I'm going to use your phone number for is sending you pocket via email or text messaging. That's it.

Hello, Reblog

DJ.Riceweevil is rebuilding. Here are some of my open tabs from today.

Kate Lyons is thinking about Second Life: "When I log in [to Second Life], it feels like I'm back in 1986, at my Apple IIe, with a super-slow dial-up modem connected to CompuServe.... For special libraries that unite users by interest, I think the value of SL is clear. Comic book archives, LGBT archives-- I think you should be on SL now (or maybe last month)."

The Sarlacc Pit is alive and well. I didn't realize this was in doubt. This reminds me of the tourism industry in Tunisia, where Star Wars fans can spend the night in the Tusken Raider village.

Seth and Amy ask Michael Vick: Really!?! The funniest SNL skit no one seems to talk about.

What's up with Blackbeltjones/work? Hey Matt, Need a hand?

Multitouch at TED

I've been skeptical of the hype surrounding multi-touch displays, but I just saw Jeff Han and Phillip Davidson demo their garage band-like-music player, and it was a little mind-blowing. "Instruments" are basically widgets that generate sound waves not unlike a Pro Tools or Garage Band time line. But here of course an instrument is limited only by the imagination of the programmer. Han and Davidson demoed keyboards, a "guitar," a simple sin wave generator, some shakers and cymbals and the iSaw.

The "instrument"

Since their display can handle many hands at once (not just two), instruments can be passed back and forth between musicians. Since they can scale in and out quickly without losing any resolution, there's a very high limit for the number of concurrent instruments. There's one global "clock" which controls the musical timeline, but individual instruments can move at their own pace. In a nice touch, the clock is round (you know, like a clock), instead of the left-to-right baton that has become the standard in sound software

I tried playing their "guitar," which looks a like a yellow football field since it's just a rectangle with some "strings" in it. Of course strings can be added and removed, the shape of the instrument can be stretched and smushed, and the display is quite sensitive to the "touch" of a finger hovering over it. When you consider this, one piece of string instrument software could emulate the behavior of all string instruments known and imagined. I attempted to make a movie of this by holding my camera phone between my teeth while I played, but I was shooting too low.

Here's a gratuitous celebrity shot of Han and Davidson demoing the instrument for Thomas Dolby and Peter Gabriel

Electronic performance today looks like a DJ or someone like Thomas Dolby sitting behind turntables, a keyboard, sampler or a powerbook or thinkpad. I've seen almost all of my favorite DJ's live - Cut Chemist, RJD2, The Executioners, Z-trip and so on, but truthfully the most you can experience by watching them is the thrill at being near their technical mastery, and perhaps some smugness that you know enough to appreciate it. Thomas Dolby opened yesterday's sessions with a performance, and although he is of course a master at his craft his performance basically consisted of banging on a bunch of buttons in rhythm. But with this technology, electronic performance is moving back towards true expression with your hands and vocals, and the audience gets to see not just the glow of the back of the powerbook but perhaps a display of the instruments themselves.

This is my first TED, and although I was a little skeptical about the tales of "Ted moments" and flashes of inspiration, I have to sheepishly admit that I think I just experienced my first.

Molly Ivins

Language Log has a fantastic obituary for Molly Ivins.

Within a respectful time after her dog Shit died, Molly Ivins began looking for another pet. She hoped to name it Achilles. "Then I'd get to command 'Achilles! Heel!'" she explains in her trademark Texas drawl.

Also of note, Garrison Keillor's tribute.

(thanks, links.net and austinist)

Lips

TMN: I love images like “Glazed” because I get the feeling that, if you had photographed an eye like this from farther away in a different light or with a different treatment, it would be indistinguishable from a photograph in a magazine or advertisement. Why have you magnified this eye?

MM: [The painting] shows glamour gone awry. But it’s also representing a real thing. It [depicts] the instant in a magazine that gives us so much pleasure. We know we’re never gonna look like that and the models aren’t even gonna look like that. I haven’t invented any of the tropes in my images. They’re all already there and I have my own interpretation.

Over at The Morning News, Nicole Pasulka interviews Marilyn Minter. It's well worth your time this evening!

You might have seen Marilyn's work in the Whitney's 2006 biennial or on Creative Time's billboards around the city. I had heard of her work but I didn't see it up close until the biennial last year, and it was by far the most memorable element of the show.

It's hard for me to put my finger on what's so appealing about Minter's work. Up close or far away you can't be quite sure if her work is made up of paint, enamel, photography or photoshop (she deals in all of these mediums), and her subject matter swings wildly between the refined and grotesque. And within these images there's an intellectual affirmation for my own obsession with gossip, celebrity and pop culture (hello, goldenfiddle).

Hello, Holidays

Putting together Apperceptive's "Happy Holidays!" post, I was momentarily overwhelmed by my good fortune this year in that I feel great about my work, my friends and my home all at once. That's pretty rare, and I'm very grateful for everyone who has helped make my life better.

AIGA New York

AIGA New York has an excerpt of Jessica Helfand's new classic book, "Reinventing the Wheel:"

The idea of deploying the circular form as a device capable of precise measurement, speedy calculation or accurate wayfinding introduces a surprisingly rich platform upon which to argue the merits of kinetic thinking. Wheels are, of course, implicitly dynamic. They represent precision on the one hand, yet suggest an infinite kind of permutation on the other. They embody at once a balanced symmetry yet simultaneously embrace endless possibilities for imbalance, irregularity, and a kind of irreverent compositional frenzy—what the writer Joseph Conrad once called “a mad art attempting the inconceivable.”

Tattered Sneakers

Jeff Chang writes:

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.

WC Fields Wins

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.

Interview with Ian MacKaye

Gothamist: Interview with Ian MacKaye:

And at some point even though I felt like we had worked really hard to tune the environment to our wavelength – in other words it was all ages, we were mindful about the lighting and making sure the security behaved themselves and we didn’t have inflatable beer bottles behind us – despite all that the irony was that my work – or art, or that thing that I do - was by and large being presented in venues where their economy was based on self-destruction. That was discouraging for me. Because ultimately the bar world is actually self-destruction. I’m not saying that alcohol is evil or there’s some moral issue on that front but rather that the [alcohol] industry traffics in self-destruction and ultimately smoking and drinking is sort of like taking yourself apart.

Blog All Open Tabs

You may have missed the Lady Upgrade Project this month:

And so they came in their droves: an army of tight black jeans with white tennis shoes, immaculately scruffy hair, drinks with straws, little handbags jammed under the armpit à la tiny dog, oversized glasses and polka dot belts. Because these people consider themselves the Beautiful of North London, they (i) have not eaten anything in months and (ii) require at least 3 metres of space around them at all times. And so I get shoved, elbowed and pushed hither and yon by skeletal creatures my grandmother would not have hesitated to describe as "real Nancy Anns", but this makes me cross, so I combine half-baked ideas of zen composure with years of karate practice, root myself to the floor, connect with my inner sociopath and emanate caaaaaalm.

The New York Times' obituary for Patrick O'Connor:

Then the neighborhood came back. Patrick said he always knew it would. "He was right," Joe said. "He paid the price, but he was right."

Suddenly, it was not unusual to enter O’Connor’s and see something unfathomable a few years earlier: young customers in their 20s and 30s, and lots of them. Drawn to the jukebox, generally regarded as top notch, and the drink prices, the new face of Park Slope — generally smooth-skinned and white — began to outnumber the old men.

The cancer came about five years ago, starting in Patrick’s lungs. “Typical Irish,” Joe said. “He waited to go to the doctor. He thought he could take care of it himself.” He kept working. Patrick O’Connor died Oct. 8, a few weeks after walking out of his bar for the last time. He was 73.

Rebecca: "Harvard biologist Marc D. Hauser has a new, big idea: that human beings, no matter what their belief system, all operate from an innate, evolutionarily defined moral grammar. His new book is called Moral Minds and Chapter 1 is available on the Web."

Geoffrey Phillips interviews Marlon James: "Sexuality occupies a curious space in Jamaican life and when religion is added to the mix, the results can be devastating. It's such a strange thing. Our expletives are all tied to female body function and the first name that children give to sex is nastiness, at least when I was a child."

Marlon James also has a Proust Questionaire for you and some ruminations on Flavor Flav: "So if Madonna has taught two generations of young girls that if a woman prostitutes herself (as opposed to a man pimping her) then that is really empowerment (and maybe it is), then what are we to make of Flava Flav, samboing himself on this trainwreck of a TV show?"

New: Inside Aperture and Faneuil Media.

And some nice words from Khoi Vin about the New York Magazine Blogs, which Apperceptive built and help support: "Building blog brands inside parent brands isn’t easy — believe me, I know — but they’ve done a very nice job of it. Note the ingeniously informative Previous and Next buttons on the article level. They’re doing a lot of things right."

John suffered a little to make those links just right. I make the coffee.

The Deep

The Deep
Originally uploaded by Lady Macabea.

"Very shy; always going solitary; unexpectedly rising to the surface in the remotest and most sullen waters; his straight and single lofty jet rising like a tall misanthropic spear upon a barren plain; gifted with such wondrous power and velocity in swimming, as to defy all present pursuit from man..."--Moby Dick, Chp. 32

Family is Homeschooling

We are taking it one day it time. Learning as we go. As Sol observed the other day, "If you think about it, really, the whole family is homeschooling."

Beautiful post from Lorraine about the decision to home school their oldest son.

Mail Time

mail time
Originally uploaded by david.

Slow Blogging Week

Originally uploaded by Steve1949.

My reblog has been pretty exciting, though. Highlights include Dean, this infographic from the independent about a cease fire in the Middle East, John's Japanese pothole pictures in Time Out New York, the Cyclones played 26 innings on Thursday (Jude and I saw a pathetic performance by the Cyclones on Wednesday, although Totonno's pizza was fantastic), Alaina's avocados are growing, and perhaps most notably Al Swerengen invests in Mule Design.

Join the OpenLab and Make Your Mark on the Public Domain

Michael Frumin writes that Eyebeam is now accepting applications for the next round of R&D Fellows in the R&D OpenLab:

We are looking for hardware and software hackers, techno arts-and-craftsters, and new types of open source makers to come to New York City and develop experimental creative technologies and media. The OpenLab represents an opportunity for selected individuals to work in a state-of-the-art digital fabrication laboratory, to collaborate with a range of talented technologists and artists from diverse and hybrid backgrounds, to gain international exposure for innovative work and to directly enrich the global DIY community, free culture and the public domain. Join past OpenLab Fellows and projects like MintyBoost, OGLE (OpenGLExtractor), SlashLinks, LED Throwies, Contagious Media and FundRace and make your mark on the Public Domain.

It's hard to overstate how awesome Eyebeam is. Any one of these projects could be the basis for a multi-million dollar company, but they choose to donate their work back to the public domain instead.

SCHMUCK RD

SCHMUCK RD
Originally uploaded by david.

Google Maps v. Thinkpad

Miyagawa has released a hack to allow the Thinkpad's accelerometer to control Google Maps. You can check the source out of his svn repository.

Miyagawa writes:

My recommendation is to choose Satellite mode, with the 3rd Zoom level. It makes me feel like flying in the sky, just as birds. Because of Google Maps JS library prefetching images, sometimes you have a delay (latency) moving, but other than that, it is quite fantastic.

Things to Like

Serena LaRogers writes:

the larogers house loves doom because it's slow, excruciatingly slow, and "doom voice" obscures lyrics, which don't benefit from being discernable. we like it because we feel doom, in chest cavity, when we read paper, watch news hour with jim lehrer*(*almost never), contemplate restrictions on reproductive rights, nearly get abducted by nyc's least gentile cab driver, and for me, i feel it at work. somehow, i just don't give a shit about well, it's not fair to name band names, not that anyone cares what i think, anyhow different music for different moods. and books too.

In our house, we like the movie Sideways. SANS ROCK.

Piece d'resistance

Piece d'resistance
Originally uploaded by jayallen.

I love this image - I can't explain why!

Cell Phone Comments

Ours is a Nokia house. Adriana has been loving the N90 and it's sweet camera, which for my money is two or three times nicer than the next best camera on a phone, which belongs to my beloved n70. And of course both phones sync wonderfully with our Apple computers. This is the perfect amount of PDA in my phone - I need to be able to check mail & appointments but rarely do I need to write mail or create appointments. When I do need to do that, the features are available, albeit inconvenient.

I've also been playing with the Spring A920 as part of their Ambassador Program. As far as I can tell, this program is a raging success. The blog chatter is off the charts, and if I'm at dinner with six or seven folks there's a good chance four of us may whip out the phones and start playing songs. This phone is great as a walkman or mini-boom box. However, there's no way will I pay $2.50 for a single or $4.99 for a ringtone.

I have played with the idea of using my Sprint phone as a primary phone, but the lack of syncing with OS X is a deal breaker. And although Nokia's "smart phone" utopia has never quite materialized and probably never will, it's still pretty good and I don't want to give it up. I love the music capabilities of my Sprint phone, but I simply don't need them. iPods are good for music, and in my estimation things will stay that way for the forseeable future.

Finally, the Sprint Ambassador program may be a victim of it's own success. I searched for some fun Sprint A920 ideas or tricks that I wouldn't have known about on my own, but all I could find was a bunch of blog entries. Relevant blog entries, but almost all of them talking about how good the Sprint A920 is at downloading music when that music is free. Yes, that is true. No, that is not what I need in a phone, especially when the music stops being free.

bud

Root markets + playsh + game neverending = bud.com, which "will turn our personal data trails into a playfield for a web-based massively-multiplayer online game... bud.com proposes to make that web more engaging through surveillance with non-threatening stakes: browser-based multiplayer play."

That's my bread and butter! I'll be watching this closely. Thanks, Justin!

Blog first, link later: I just noticed the playsh website has relaunched as a wiki with a useful reference of inspirational projects.

Wii Wii Wii

Alice from Wonderland loves the Wii: "You know what, I think it's a fantastic name. It's girly, metro, slinky, inoffensive, funny, cute, KAWAIIII, and it's got people really talking." Over at hello, nintendo we lack that vision. Wii?

Living in the City

Living in New York City is all about embracing constraints and making them work for you. For better or for worse, New Yorkers surround themselves with rules.

For instance, at the Shake Shack today I noticed that they've instituded a 6 burger per person limit. In the loading dock one block down, they ask that you please "go" outside and advise that you avoid "stickley" garbage.

Recycling & Foie Gras

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:

• Certified humane, via megnut.


• The Gurgling Cod: "No one mentions that much more suffering could be eliminated by banning the McNugget." Via finn. Bonus points for name checking The Power Broker.

Relationshapes

Happy birthday Kate!

Happy birthday Kate!
Originally uploaded by gjs.

I hope it's the same Kate!

Sopranos vs. Sleeper Cell II

Anil beat me to the post [1] regarding the amazing "Mobsters vs. Arabs" CNN Poll. After reading his post this afternoon, I reconsidered the article.

56,000 votes in and more than thirty five thousand people trust the Mafia, whereas only around twenty thousand people trust an "Arab-based" company. This is "why they hate us" (tm) - because we hate them. Given the choice between an "Arab" company and the Mafia, who are infamous for murder, graft and anti-social behavior, we choose the Mafia. We assume that an anonymous "Arab-based" group is probably going to be worse than the Gambinos, Lucheesis or Gottis. That's absolutely astounding, even moreso when you consider that cnn.com readers probably lean left.

[1] In the past week, Anil scooped Ray Ozzie on cut & paste and he beat me to a CNN critique. That's pretty good!

click! click! click!

click! click! click!
Originally uploaded by featherbed.

Thank you Alaina!

Good Accounting (In which I Become a Corporate Schill for American Express)

Since I started working for myself in the middle of last year, I've had to change my entire approach to how I approach and arrange my finances. I've fastidiously kept almost every receipt and missive from cable, mobile, credit card, student loan companies and anything that could remotely approach relevance come the Ides of April. Despite this, the pile of paper and impending math is intimidating, and I am constantly afraid of the mess that is my accounting "system." Since I do so much banking on-line, I'd been frustrated that my credit card companies couldn't offer me a spreadsheet of all my purchases, which would make all of this math much easier. I still get mail every week from American Express addressed to $$FIRST_NAME$$ $$LAST_NAME$$.

This week they offered $$FIRST_NAME$$ a "Year End Summary." Curious, I clicked through, and my dreams were answered. Here are all my purchases, not only in PDF, CSV or XLS, but broken down by category. I am floored! There's even an "interactive" version where you can re-categorize misfiled items, although it appears they did a great job. And they should, it's what they do!

Highs and Lows:

• $2000 in "travel" expenses, broken down into airfare, lodging, and other. "Other," the largest chunk, consists entirely of Subway and Amtrak fares. South By Southwest accommodations and three plane trips account for the balance. It would be nice if they could connect the name on the reservations, in two cases Adriana's, into the spreadsheet since I can't write off her tickets on my taxes.


• $1300 in restaurants - less than I would have guessed, but probably because it's so common to pay with cash in New York.


• $0 automobile related charge, account related charges and late fees.


• $[embarrassingly large number] in "Merchandise," the vast majority of which is mobile phone and server costs that I passed on to clients and co-workers. The rest is video games and books. Why did I make three trips to H&M in July? And Apple - wow. Just, wow. Five trips to Whole Foods: $474. Got to get that under control this year!

we*heart*prints

If you heart art, you'll heart we*heart*prints. Fantastic!

Youth Media Blogs

If you think that there's more to Youth Media online than myspace, you will probably enjoy Tricia's new blog YouMeiTI, humbly defined as "Exploring the nexus of Chinese Youth culture, Media, Technology and Information within a global context."

There's more! My friends at evc just released their long awaited curriculum for teaching documentary. And if you like that, the excellent Youth Media Distribution Toolkit is a still available.

Best of CNN++

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.)

The Internet is Full of Good People

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.

Teacher OR Blogger?

In The Last Weblog Assignment, my Mom shows off her versatility as teacher and blogger:

But thanks to everyone for sticking with it. I have enjoyed cruising through your colors, shapes, words, movies, and books. You have increased the dimensions of my world and, I hope, of one another's worlds as well.

<3, Dr. Jacobs

P.S. I have checked them all, so don't try to publish on a previous date. Just be honest---always the best policy. I am happy to give you partial credit.

Tabla Spices

tabla_spices
Originally uploaded by Alaina B..

Big Time Textuality

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.

Cat in a Saucepan

Cat in a Saucepan
Originally uploaded by Lady Macabea.

Easy.

Beta!

Hello, Typepad! is going to be in beta for a few hours. Pardon our dust.

Update: Things are a little more settled now. "Best viewed in Firefox" until I get a few more spare hours (har, har).

Overheard this Morning

"I'm not doing it for pay, I'm doing it for pagerank."

Name redacted to protect the guilty.