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Free Delgado!

Lets Go Mets is one of my favorite blogs for a few obvious reasons (Baseball, Mr.Met, early Vox blogger). This past Sunday night he recognized that Carlos Delgado, one of the Mets biggest underachievers, was performing like a superstar during the day but a scrub (at best) at night.

The story was subsequently picked up by Metsblog, and then New York Newsday. Alex Britell took this a step further in the New York Sun and invented a new statistic to measure the gap between day and night performance:

I've conceived a metric called Vision%, which simply measures night batting as a percentage of day batting, with 100 being equal dexterity at night and during the day, with the assumption that, all other things being equal, the average player will see and hit similarly at both times. For instance, if Player X bats .294 during the day, but .252 at night, his Vision% is 86. Moves of a few points in Vision% can mean huge jumps — chiefly because players hit about twice as many times at night.

...Delgado's Vision% has been on a downward trend since before he came to the Mets — from 97 in 2005, to 90 in 2006, to 85 last year, to this year's awful 58.

Carlos Delgado also enjoys the starting first basemen's role on my Fantasy Baseball team, the Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis Reservoirs. Please, Carlos, go to an eye doctor! The Reservoirs need your Vision% to be in the 90s!

Blog all Open Tabs

Of course, the day I don't read the Internet is the day it gets good:

My Mom is finishing her last year as a high school teacher: "All week long I have been carrying 23 years worth of high school teaching paraphernalia to the trash, to my car, to my house, and to the thrift store. I have carried books and papers, student notes and George Foreman grills, paper plates, cough drops, and post-its."

Talking Points Memo is growing, and Josh says Don't Miss This: "At TPM, as you know, our core mission is news and reporting. But having a venue where we can host these kinds of more searching discussions -- less tied to the immediacy of the news cycle -- into politics, culture, foreign affairs, the arts, etc. has always been a goal of mine."

Two TPM links! The site is that good: "President Clinton is obviously committed to doing whatever he can and is asked to do to ensure Senator Obama is the next President of the United States."

Daniel Jalkut, who wrote the blogging software I'm using to publish this very post, considers remote clients and blog security: "If you’ve only got one “real API” that touches the critically important data, then you’ve only got one door to secure. Furthermore, when all views into the blog are required to share the same API, suddenly none of them is deprived of functionality that the other has."

Sarah Lacy - What LinkedIn Doubters Need to Know: "There are so many moments where Hoffman – and I should add Dan Nye the current CEO—have resisted cheap growth, from both users and revenues, in favor of building a sustainable business."

Siva Vaidhyanathan is a long time Google skeptic. As part of his ongoing analysis and coverage of Google, he often finds gaping holes in the mainstream coverage of teh GOOG: "I think it's pretty clear that Google is using Google News to collect information to improve the overall search experiment... Yet the incumbent industry can't imagine anything but zero-sum... This story in the Times proceeds from that zero-sum perspective: Google News is not dominant, not growing, not clubbing the competition; therefore something must be wrong with it. However, Google operates with different principles in mind. The more other content sites succeed, the more Google benefits from their success."

There's a new definition for patience in software development: "After 15 long years of active development, Wine software which makes it possible to run native Windows applications [without Windows], has reached it's milestone 1.0 version. What are the features of this new stable release of Wine you ask ? Well, one of the prerequisites of the version 1.0 release, I am told, was that it should be able to run Adobe Photoshop CS2 flawlessly in Linux. And that has been achieved"

Every Lego set in history stored in "secret" vault.

11/12ths of Apperceptive

11/12ths of Apperceptive
Originally uploaded by capndesign.

If Arnold was running as a Republican, he'd be mopping the floor with the other candidates, right?

Poor Lady L

Poor Lady L
Originally uploaded by david.

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

Grimthamist

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:

1. NYU Suicide (fishy circumstances)
2. Lisa Stein Murder (coerced confession)
3. Kanye's Mom died (fishy circumstances)
4. Legal Absinthe (no comment)
5. Husband Possibly Involved in 75K Robbery - of Wife (very sad)

Maybe it's the weather?

The Sun is rising and setting on Apperceptive clients on three continents, so I'm sleeping less. With that in mind, I offer you the North Pole wikipedia page.

photo.jpg

photo.jpg
Originally uploaded by david.

Things that are or will be big.

Inches Too Tall for Tunnel, Rig Plies It Anyway:

It was just six inches. That was what made the difference at 4:40 a.m. yesterday as Gilberto Cantu, a truck driver from Texas, approached the New Jersey entrance of the Lincoln Tunnel in his big rig, loaded with bathtubs, toilets and plumbing fixtures. The truck was 13 feet 6 inches high. The tunnel has a height limit of 13 feet. Six inches can make a big difference.

Venezuela's Counter-Revolution on YouTube

Ars Technica is running a story about RCTV, a Venezuelan television station whose broadcast license was refused renewal by the government. In response, the station turned to YouTube to get its message out. Says Ars, 'El Observador clips have been seen 175,000 times since May 28, and the channel is currently the most-subscribed channel of the week. While putting the station's shows on YouTube is an excellent idea, YouTube still lacks anything near the reach of over-the-air broadcasts. But the use of the site to avoid censorship is growing, and it's not hard to imagine a day in the near future when the site (or sites like it) becomes as essential as local TV stations.

The Buzzfeed Widget:

Via BuzzFeed

When Affordable Housing Gets Expensive

Uptown Flavor notes that the Daily News is tracking cases where the city's public housing falls too quickly into disrepair:

Most people know that homeownership is expensive. You pay for everything from the closing costs to water bills to fixing a leaky faucet. When the costs of repairs are directly connected to poor workmanship by the contractors then whose pocket should the money come out of?

As part of a continuing series in the Daily News, homes that were shoddily built using HPD subsidies are exposed. Some would shrug it off and say, “sell it and move on.” It’s not quite that simple for homeowners like Lt. Delgado from Harlem. Delgado has only owned his home for 3 years and he has suffered extensive water damage due to poor construction of the home. If he were to bail out now, the city would require him to pay back about $100,000 in subsidies.

This news item is like the NYC housing trifecta: gentrification, rent control/subsidized housing and the ineptitude (possible corruption?) of the city's administration.

Overheard this Evening

Everyone has menus, all over the world, so why is menupages exclusive to New York?

Great question, anonymous reader. There's no good answer.

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).

Ruminations on the iPhone

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?)

Best Answer

Kathryn knows brunch.

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.

Take It Away

Trivia!

What subway station has downtown trains on the same platform that run in different directions? Friends of mine have a slight advantage, since obviously I've been on this subway platform recently.

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.

Assassination Vacation

I'm late to the Assassination Vacation party, but I'm here. What a book! This book reminds me very strongly of a few close friends of mine - the ridiculous missions, the obsession with American presidential history and radical politics, and the deep appreciation for a good coincidence. I can recommend this book to anyone, although since it seems like everyone has already recommended it to me and I'm late I'll just stop repeating myself.

Dave Welch's interview with Vowell at Powells.com is a fun read. Dave Welch asks Sarah about her love for Siskel & Ebert and her response is worth quoting:

That show was important for me as a hick kid from nowhere; it was my first exposure to criticism.

I loved that these two guys argued with each other as if movies actually mattered. Nobody I knew talked about movies that way, but Siskel and Ebert took each movie as it came and talked about whether it was a success on its own terms. They talked about things they liked, not things they were supposed to like.

...

And that's one of the things I think my work is about, really, the difference between things you're supposed to like and things you actually do like.

What I think I appreciated most about the book was how much Vowell loved America. The architecture of the tiny memorial stalls most of us skip by without thinking, all of the docents and historians she encounters along the way, even the freeways and mall parking lots were transformed into sites of high (or at least medium) adventure. Most of all, Vowell loves a good road trip, the unique freedom of traveling in America.

Flying home Saturday afternoon, I was clutching only this book and my MacBook as I trudged through security. Big dude in front of me was upset about having to pour out his Coke (Coke was, of course, for sale not twenty yards further down the concourse.) I commiserated with him, and also made a sympathetic nod to the mother ahead of us who was pouring milk out of her baby's bottle, and his response was "This is why I can't wait to get back over there and kill more of them. I've already killed of six of them for y'all, and I want to get to ten."

I realized that the foiled spine declaring ASSASINATION in all-caps arial was on full view under big man's nose in the grey security tupperware also containing my shoes, quarters and cell phone. Of all the days to travel with a book called Assassination Vacation. I skirted away and made it home without further incident.

CSI: Sidewalk

CSI: Sidewalk
Originally uploaded by blackbeltjones.

More to come soon.

Blog All Open Tabs

• Mr. Ratner’s Neighborhood: Manipulative developers, shrill protesters, and a sixteen-tower glass-and-steel monster marching inexorably forward. What the battle for the soul of Brooklyn looks like—from right next door. Related: The Atlantic Yards Report.
• The Wire behind the scenes:
  

  Whoever you were in Baltimore, you were getting fucked. The second season was to describe the death of work. The third season was to show what happens to reform and reformers and to examine the whole nature of why policy never changes.
  
  And this season is to take argument with those who feel that if you're born without privilege, but make the right set of choices, that you will be spared. To do away with that bit of national mythology.

  This is the kind of blogging I like: Stills from the set, no spoilers, and well-constructed English language.

• Future HBO links should be considered in the context of Ian McShane's lawyers' disdain for Deadwood fans.
• Coffee and Conservation, via Harold's exceptional Typepad featured weblogs.
• Jason Kottke: How I Blog. The secret sauce boils down to building trust with your readers. This is why Corporate Blogs Still Suck.
• UPDATE: Since I began drafting this post a tab to Idle Words has been opened.

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.

Bourdain stuck in Lebanon

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.

Blog All Open Tabs, Part III

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!

From The New Yorker:

"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.

Skyline for Sale

I'd be remiss if I didn't link to Skyline for Sale, the latest Times coverage of Bruce Ratner's proposed development surrounding the Brooklyn Nets' new stadium.

The article is promising, but ultimately delivers only gossip and some rough ideas about how architects should theoretically act. There's no news. One of the Times great city writers should take a Brooklynite under their wing and cover this story and all of the characters surrounding it with a McNulty-like[1] tenacity. This is the kind of thing that a blogger should do well, but I don't know of anyone who is.

[1] That is, like a dog drying to dig up a bone in the yard.

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.

Web 2.0 NYC Conference

Mark Wilkie and I are having a Web 2.0 conference tomorrow at 3pm. Venue: The Shake Shack. Speakers: TBA.

UPDATE:

Jason Kottke has purchased a keynote at the conference. (Whether or not he keynotes is another matter). All participants who attend will receive this Deck-sized ad that they can place on their website. Thanks to our "Motivator" sponsors at Mule Design for the badge.

To particpate in the virtual Web 2.0 Shake Shack conference, place this badge on your web site:

<br /> <object width="88" height="31"><br /> <param name="movie" value="http://buzzcompliant.com/media/web2point0.swf"><br /> <embed src="http://buzzcompliant.com/media/web2point0.swf" width="88" height="31"></embed><br /> </object><br /> <br />

Nice Door

Nice Door
Originally uploaded by david.

The Morning News' Digest

I just noticed The Morning News Digest, "A weekly round-up of books (Mondays), mp3s (Wednesdays), and videos (Fridays)." This is my 18 year-old self's internet holy grail. My 30 year-old self is a little overwhelmed with a "books to read" list fifty titles long and an impossibly large mp3 collection, but this is still a fantastic resource.

randomwalks/dj

The front page of my my reblog is currently "fantastic". Today you'll find that the army is lifeblogging, how to judge asparagus, a rocketboom interview with Negativland, the craziest (best) use of bluetooth I've ever seen, and Star Wars bookends.

Here are the Star Wars Bookends, because it is really important that you see them:

I also finally dropped that garish layout. It's better now.

Remnick, The New Yorker and the War

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 Big Brooklyn Dig

The long rumored demolition of the BQE looks closer to reality, thanks to some DOT Billions. In it's place will be a Boston-style tunnel running the length of the west side of Brooklyn. This the best thing that could happen to Brooklyn right now, especially with real estate getting squeezed as far out as Bedstuy & Bay Ridge.

I live two blocks from the BQE, and there's no understating how much of a drag the BQE and the Belt Parkway are on the neighborhood's growth. The dust and exhaust from the highways covers the surrounding blocks in dark black soot, cars come flying off of the 3rd and 6th avenue exits onto residential streets at Highway speeds, making 65th and 60th streets some of the most accident prone in the city, and it acts as a physical barrier keeping residents from getting to the waterfront.

I often cite the The Power Broker as the most influential book I have ever read. Anyone who has ever wondered why the New York City highways are so weird and poorly constructed needs to read it. I have two copies, if you'd like to borrow one. I have also seen two copies on Joshua Mack's shelf, so I know I'm in good company. For more background on the objections made when Moses was building the BQE through Sunset Park, search inside the Power Broker on Amazon.com.

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.

Birkin Still in Beta

Paging Mena Trott!

I bought this second-hand [sporran purse] in Edinburgh three years ago, and a more useful little thing one couldn't own. It's the envy of Paris. I gave up on the [Birkin] bag right away. That bloody thing. I told Hermes they were mad to make it. My one was always full and it ended up giving me tendonitis.

Jane Birkin abandons the Birkin, via Agenda Inc.
Also of interest: Tom Cruise is "still in Theta." Mena's Corner is now no longer a dinosaur feed according to NetNewsWire. Stingy Bar and Scribbling.Net remain.

Triple Redundnacy

Triple Redundnacy
Originally uploaded by david.

Starbucks makes it's money by replicating the exact same experience thousands of times and analyzing customer behavior. Since Starbucks are built so close together now, I wouldn't mind a little variation. The quiet Starbucks, the no laptop Starbucks, the naked Starbucks, the business Starbucks (better wifi but more expensive coffee), and so on. Eventually, every storefront will be Starbucks, but with a different niche. There's still room for innovation in the burnt beans and hot water vertical.

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!

Sopranos or Sleeper Cell?

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.

mny1tiu

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.

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!

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.

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.

Shake Shack Reopening Countdown

Tabla Spices

tabla_spices
Originally uploaded by Alaina B..

Prospect Park NYC

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.

Cat in a Saucepan

Cat in a Saucepan
Originally uploaded by Lady Macabea.

Easy.

Again with The the MoMA

Boats on ground

The same but silver

Moblogger descending staircase

People love those Campbell's Soup cans

Overheard this Morning

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

Name redacted to protect the guilty.

The Gang Rule of Four Fourteen Four Four Four Four Four

True friend Meg tagged me with four things. Kenyatta almost did, but apparently he was worried about a self induced overdose of vitamin M(eme). Nonsense!

Four Jobs I've Had:

1. Perl Programmer - From the first iteration of nea.org in the summer of 1994 to my current work as a full time software architect and programmer, I've always been a programmer at heart. Also at the NEA, I built a link sharing program from teachers in the summer of 1996. There was no auth (or tags) but it did have comments. (I should have kept going with that. :) The search was a regular expression, and the "view all" button was simply a search on the letter 'e.' I'm pretty good at this, but after 12 years I should be even better!
2. MediaRights - Director of Technology and Distribution. The "and distribution" was only added to my title in the last year I was there, but I loved my job at MediaRights helping filmmakers get their messages further. It was my boss Nicole who gave the folks at Netflix the idea of releasing films from PBS/POV to Netflix subscribers the day they were broadcast, and now that distribution model is all the rage.
3. Teacher - Both at SEI and the House of Umoja in Portland, Oregon. Both my parents are life long teachers, so it seemed completely natural for me to take teaching jobs in Portland during a semester off from school and again after I graduated. It actually never occurred to me to look for programming jobs after college, although obviously I came back to it.
4. Odd jobs at Oberlin - I had a million jobs at Oberlin, including working at conference services and in the student union.

Four_{teen +2} movies I can watch over and over:

• The Celebration
• The Chungking Express
• Contact
• Fireworks
• The Fugitive
• The Hulk
• In the Mood for Love
• The Incredibles
• The Iron Giant
• Mullholland Drive
• Rear Window
• Rushmore
• Tampopo
• Star Trek VI
• The Third Man
• Toy Story 2

Four places I've lived:

1. Fairfax, Virginia
2. Oberlin, Ohio
3. Portland, Oregon
4. New York City

Four TV Shows I love:

1. The Wire - All 4 entries could be Wire episodes, especially the last half of the third season.
2. Monk - I'm monkish.
3. Deadwood
4. Mets Baseball

Four Places I've vacationed:

• London, England
• Paris, France
• Tokyo, Japan
• Vancouver, Canada

Four of my favorite dishes:

1. Pepperoni Pizza - I'm vegan, but this is still my favorite food.
2. Adriana's Beans and Rice
3. Dumplings (regular old fried dumplings are fine for me.
4. Dosa (hopefully from the Dosa Cart)

Four sites I visit daily:

• http://davidjacobs.livejournal.com/friends/
• http://dj.riceweevil.com/
• http://google.com/ig/
• http://flickr.com/photos/friends/

Four places I would rather be right now:

1. Montreal (never been!)
2. Alaska
3. Portland, OR
4. Houseboat

Who's next???

1. Adriana
2. Angela
3. Mr. Sun!
4. Claire

How Pixar Adds a New School of Thought to Disney

How Pixar Adds a New School of Thought to Disney is a fantastic article in the New York Times about how Pixar shunned the Hollywood style freelance/contract working model in favor of building long term talent. You're going to see this article linked everywhere because everyone in the world who takes pride in their work can relate to the lessons herein.

"The problem with the Hollywood model is that it's generally the day you wrap production that you realize you've finally figured out how to work together," Mr. Nelson said. "We've made the leap from an idea-centered business to a people-centered business. Instead of developing ideas, we develop people. Instead of investing in ideas, we invest in people. We're trying to create a culture of learning, filled with lifelong learners. It's no trick for talented people to be interesting, but it's a gift to be interested. We want an organization filled with interested people."

This reminds me a little bit of Big Mouth Productions and MediaRights, where I used to work (they're hiring, by the way).

The title of the article is a little misleading since Pixar obviously hasn't added much to Disney in the six days since the merger became official. As a movie and animation lover, here's hoping that some of these ideas find their way into the notoriously worker-unfriendly Disney workflow.

Marketing Brokeback Mountain

There's a nice article in the Wall Street Journal about how delicately Brokeback Mountain was marketed. The goal was not to draw controversy, but rather to avoid it. The strategy worked, and Brokeback is one of the biggest hits this year. They also played very close attention to the social "microclimates" of New York City, bringing a little chaos theory into their marketing ideas. Me likey.

Like microclimates in Napa Valley that can produce dramatically different wines, neighborhoods in Manhattan can draw entirely different audiences: Chelsea attracts gay viewers, the Village students, the Lincoln Center-area affluent boomers. Word of mouth from a Manhattan opening can determine with what audience a film succeeds or fails.

Normally, 'Brokeback' would have opened in downtown theaters in the SoHo-East Village areas -- typical for an art-house film. Instead, on its opening weekend Dec. 9, Mr. Foley placed 'Brokeback' into a megaplex in Chelsea, another uptown at Lincoln Center, and only one near Greenwich Village. 'I didn't want New York to say this is an art-house film,' says Mr. Foley. 'I wanted a mix of voices talking about it to defeat it being called 'a gay cowboy movie.' '

Being a romantic, I also think that the movie does well because the crafting of the cinematography, editing and sound is well worth repeated viewings on the large screen. The incredible acting from top to bottom helps too - I think people are taken aback when they see actors who really act.

You can track the box office results at the always excellent Box Office Mojo.

"Oh, really? Because I happen to have Mr. Bray right here."

In his latest A List Apart column, "Web 3.0," Jeffrey Zeldman perfectly nails the tension between style and substance that is poisoning the well for many of us web people.

At first I tolerated the pain by mentally modifying the famous scene from Annie Hall:

HIM: "I teach a venture capitalist workshop, so I think my insights into XML have a great deal of validity."

ME: "Oh, really? Because I happen to have Mr. Bray right here."

Later I gnawed my knuckles. At some point, in a kind of fever, I may have moaned. Blessedly, at last the lights dimmed and the night's real speakers redeemed the evening.

But the ass whose braying I'd endured left a bad taste.