hello typepad

Drink your Friend’s to Improve your Own

If there’s one thing helps you improve your coffee service more than anything else, it’s tasting everyone else’s coffee. Regularly, as often as possible. Tasting nothing but your own product develops predilection for what you’re serving, and it becomes impossible to be objective. Of course you think your coffee tastes great! That’s all you drink!

via shotzombies.com

True for everything - not just coffee!

Catching razor clams

I've dug/raked for my fair share of shellfish (oysters, steamers, littlenecks and mussels) but I'd never harvested razor clams. I've seen their shells all over the beaches, but until a few years ago never realized people ate them. Then I had them roasted with butter and garlic at St. John's in London and fell in love! While reading my new Forgotten Skills of Cooking I learned a simple way to catch razor clams: pour salt in their hole and watch them wriggle out!

That's crazy! I can't wait to try it! Also if anyone knows a good source for buying razor clams in New York City, please let me know. I want to start eating them more regularly.

via www.megnut.com

I also want to try this!

In last Sunday's episode of Mad Men, Grandpa Gene ate ice cream right out of the container and salted each spoonful before putting it in his mouth.

via kottke.org

It's fun to read all of Jason's Mad Men posts in one place.

The Key to 'Inception'

The Awl's Maria Bustillos on Inception as a metaphor for cinema:

The easiest way to access this interpretation is to examine the character of Mal, the wife of Dom Cobb. She represents Cobb’s personal inspiration; the Greek kind of muse, not just the beautiful-girl kind. Young artists conceive a passion for their métier that is analogous to a love affair. “He’s wedded to his work,” people will say. The indescribable beauty of books, paintings or music that strikes us with such brilliance and force when we are young; we fall in love with that. Some fall in love to such a degree that nothing will suffice but that they too must become painters, writers, musicians.

via www.theawl.com

I was going to make the same point, but I figured I'd give my friends a week to see the film before I posted a spoiler (real fans watch, but even real fans have other things to do). Usually, the female protagonist's role is a go-to cipher to unlock a film's deeper meaning ("The muse will always be tempting him to indulge his own vision, rather than trying to reach outside himself for it."), but in this case there's a lot more.

When Ariadne and Cobb "ride" Cobb's nostalgia as an elevator, Nolan is evoking the editing process — the two of them are cutting across set and sequence, as well as setting the stage for Ariadne to unspool Cobb in the final "escape" sequence of the film. Nolan has absorbed critical hits for the exposition in these scenes, but because the exposition only illuminates the superficial text of the movie it offers an additional layer of misdirection. Cobb's team is also assembled as a film crew would be: the flawed but irreplaceable director, his long time partner and producer, the money man, the spoiled film star, the cinematographer, special effects engineer, and so on.

Armond White's criticism of the film ("Despicable Inception"), reads to me like he is still angry about Memento (So am I! So horrible, so socially regressive, &c!):

[h]is shapeless storytelling (going from Paris to Mumbai to nameless ski slopes, carelessly shifting tenses like a video game) throws audiences into artistic limbo — an “unconstructed dream space” like Toy Story 3—that leaves them bereft of art’s genuine purpose: a way of dealing with the real world.

Armond's criticism articulates what I think was the major flaw in Memento, but Inception is smarter, and far superior. (I still consider Armond White our greatest film contemporary film critic). I saw Inception a little early, with absolutely no idea what it was about (I hadn't even seen a trailer). But i did know that I hated Memento — on our first night out Adriana and I argued about it for most of the evening. I wouldn't go so far as to say Inception is brilliant, but it is fun and challenging.

What I Love about Trail Blazer Fans

Apple's YouTube Channel

via www.youtube.com

I'm generally not worried about Apple, I think they are a great company, and their ethics and soul are made apparent by incredible products. If Apple produced only the iPad, the iPhone, the iMac or the MacBook that would be enough to earn them the adoration of geeks. Additionally, Apple democratized filmmaking by dropping the floor of the cost of editing on professional-grade hardware. Just six years ago, every independent film had to find tens of thousands of dollars to rent an "Avid." Apple also invented Quicktime and popularized¹ H.264 compression, which dramatically improved the quality of video on desktops, mobile devices and the web.

But sadly, if you look at Apple's YouTube channel, you'll find videos of press conferences, ads for products, and weird short ditties about how their competitor's products are flawed — since when does Apple care about competitors? This effort is out of sync with Apple's creative roots.

¹thanks Jason

Which summer read will be in your beach bag?

My Kindle. Hopefully I'll get through Reality Hunger and A Gate at the Stairs. Also, diapers.

TypePad Conversations » Answer this question!

Introducing the Microcontent Client - Anil Dash

For the purposes of this application, we're not talking about microcontent in the strict Jakob Nielsen definition that's now a few years old, which focused on making documents easy to skim. Today, microcontent is being used as a more general term indicating content that conveys one primary idea or concept, is accessible through a single definitive URL or permalink, and is appropriately written and formatted for presentation in email clients, web browsers, or on handheld devices as needed. A day's weather forcast, the arrival and departure times for an airplane flight, an abstract from a long publication, or a single instant message can all be examples of microcontent. But, as we'll see, these pieces of microcontent are best handled by a program designed for the task.

The microcontent client is an extensible desktop application based around standard Internet protocols that leverages existing web technologies to find, navigate, collect, and author chunks of content for consumption by either the microcontent browser or a standard web browser. The primary advantage of the microcontent client over existing Internet technologies is that it will enable the sharing of meme-sized chunks of information using a consistent set of navigation, user interface, storage, and networking technologies. In short, a better user interface for task-based activities, and a more powerful system for reading, searching, annotating, reviewing, and other information-based activities on the Internet.

via dashes.com

We've been talking about a microcontent client for years now, and finally all the pieces and infrastructure are in place to build it. The best parts of the microcontent client are that it's fully backwards compatible, it can leverage the unused abilities of existing content to improve their utility, and that its appearance in the software market is inevitable.

I'm testing a new reblog thing by reblogging Anil's old post about reblogging. But still - you should go back and read this post, it was quite prescient.

via dj.riceweevil.com

I almost forgot to watch this.

Half life of culture is down to a week.

via kellan@twitter.com

I agree, but how could we lengthen the half life, instead of shortening it? Or is that a problem unique to trending topics on twitter?