November 17, 2007
Chumby for Chanukah
Dave's convinced me. I'm going to ask for my family to contribute toward buying me a Chumby for Chanukah. Using it simply as a (rather small) digital picture frame practically justifies the price by itself. Add in its openness and general coolness, and I want one!
Posted by self at 09:54 AM | Comments (5) | TrackBack
November 16, 2007
MacArthur grants Berkman $4M
The Berkman Center has received a $4 million grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation (for four million, we spell out the entire name) to support the Center's tenth anniversary and beyond.
This is fantastic news. The Berkman Center is part of Harvard Law but relies on the kindness of others for financial support. From the Berkman posting about the MacArthur grant:
Over the past decade, through a series of grants, as well as substantive involvement in the center's work, MacArthur has been instrumental in the success of numerous Berkman efforts, such as: OpenNet Initiative, the Digital Media Exchange, Digital Natives, Global Voices, and the study of citizen media. These have led to numerous policy changes, two books, and two spin-off organizations -- one non-profit, the other for-profit.
Thank you, John D. and Catherine T.!
Posted by self at 11:10 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
November 09, 2007
Item: Fish have three-second memories
Good. If I were a fish, I wouldn't want more than three seconds of memory.
Posted by self at 05:14 AM | Comments (6) | TrackBack
Item: Fish have three-second memories
Good. If I were a fish, I wouldn't want more than three seconds of memory.
Posted by self at 05:14 AM | Comments (6) | TrackBack
November 04, 2007
Dr. Bechtel?
Is AKMA's rumor mongering well-founded? Is it now Dr. Trevor Bechtel? If so, there's a rumor I'm giving Trevor a hearty congratulations!
Posted by self at 09:06 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
November 03, 2007
Vint Cerf by Joi Ito
Click on this photo of Vint Cerf by Joi Ito to see it in more of its glory.
Joi also has a comic book comment on the appointment of a new chairman of ICANN... [Tags: vint_cerg joi_ito]
Posted by self at 07:15 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
November 02, 2007
From forms to comedy
Docstoc.com is a free site to "find and share professional documents." Here's what the About page says:
Find a vast quantity of high quality legal, business, technology, educational, and creative documents for free. docstoc allows users to upload their documents for all the world to share.
In addition, users can store their documents in their own personal online folders for anytime, anywhere access.
My guess when I got the site was that they were aiming at letting people share useful forms and templates. And there are lots of them there. But it also has bunches of people using it as a self-publishing site. For example, click on the comedy category. Since there is a Comedy category, my initial assumption was wrong. In any case, since the site leaves itself wide open for how people want to use it, and provides a good set of tools for community filtering and organizing, it'll become whatever we want it to become. Who knows, maybe it'll become the go-to site for comedy forms.
Or, of course, it may never take on a particular use, in which case it's unlikely to succeed. Is it intending to be the YouTube of documents? In any case, for its openness, Creative Commons-ness, and folksonomosity, I wish it well.
PS: The FAQ notes that for now, there's no limit on how much space users can have for private storage of their own documents. How long before the first greedy person ruins it for the rest of us?
Posted by self at 08:22 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
October 26, 2007
This week at the Berkman Center
Every week, Patrick McKiernan at the Berkman Center puts together a brief sampler of what various Fellows 'n' friends have been writing. Just to give you a taste, here's this week's list:
*Rebecca MacKinnon critiques the proposed Global Online Freedom Act of 2007.
*Wendy Seltzer argues for privacy in registering domain names.
*Doc Searls considers Facebook the latest in a string of online "walled gardens."
*Dan Gillmor praises The New York Times for opening up to outside researchers.
*Citizen Media Law Project: ONI Releases Bulletin on Internet Shutdown in Burma.
*Weekly Global Voice: Costa Rica: Free-Trade Agreement Passes.
You can sign up for the weekly listing of "Berkman Buzz" here.
[Tags: berkman]
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October 19, 2007
I won an award
There's no nice way to put this. Last night I won the "Mover and Shaker" of the year award from the Mass Technology Leadership Council. Apparently, my three summers at Macarena camp have paid off.
But seriously, thank you, MTLC! [Tags: mtlc ]
Posted by self at 04:16 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack
September 19, 2007
Keynote animation weirdness
Keynote's ability to animate objects has gotten much better in the new version (Keynote '08, v 4), but it's still not up to PowerPoint. The biggest gap at this point is it's inability to loop actions. This may be because Keynote apparently doesn't let users interrupt animations, so a loop would loop forever, making for an especially ineffective but oddly hypnotic presentation. Also, and less important, Keynote is surprisingly sparse with the graphic shapes it provides, and those shapes aren't as manipulable as PowerPoint's. E.g., PPT gives control points for block arrows so you can adjust the head, provides "smart" workflow connectors, etc.
Way more important to me: Keynote doesn't always let you say two effects should run at the same time. Sometimes yes, sometimes no. I was finding this frustratingly unpredictable until I realized that in some cases it would allow simultaneous actions that were in slide sets I imported from PowerPoint. (Keynote's import and export facilities are awesome.) As soon as I altered the action in Keynote, the "do action with" option went away, leaving only the "do action after" choice. If I've diagnosed this correctly (and, really, what are the chances?), then Keynote can display behaviors it doesn't allow users to create.
Weird. But it does leave the possibility of exporting the deck to PowerPoint, doing the animation work, and importing back into Keynote...except you'll lose Keynote's over-the-top eye candy, especially for slide transitions.
(I'm not a Keyspan expert, although I'm pretty good at PowerPoint. If I'm wrong about any or all of this, please set me straight. Thanks.)
Posted by self at 10:23 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
September 08, 2007
Collaborative band name exchange
When you're tempted to borrow the Dave Barry trope of adding "And, by the way, that would make an excellent name for a band," you can share the name at NowFormABand, a site created by Aanand Prasad. Recent names include: Foxy Morons, Clot, CornSquat and Eat More Chemicals.
None of the names I saw match the pure, godawful ridiculousness of my band's name in high school: Wheel and the Spokesmen. Even today I can play a truly awful rendition of "This Diamond Ring"...
(Link via Yesh Omrim.)
Posted by self at 07:45 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
September 02, 2007
Joho the Newsletter
I've posted a new issue of my newsletter. You can read it here. You can subscribe for free here.
|
The
Privacy
Non-Principle:
Privacy is too squirrely for principles. We need to keep it difficult. |
Posted by self at 08:27 AM | Comments (4) | TrackBack
August 24, 2007
Things that happen to your body when you're not looking
I think I "run" faster when listening to my iPod because I have it cranked it up so loud — I have middle-aged hearing loss, also known as "Why do today's youth mumble? It's a sign of disrespect!" disease — that it masks the sound of my panting. That can't be a good thing.
In only vaguely related news, I find fascinating the explanatory hypothesis of why we have out of body experiences. If I understand it (and there is no chance that I do), the idea is that the brain constructs the sense of having a persistent body by synthesizing the various streams of internal and external sensations. When those streams fall out of synch, the brain, which would rather be wrong than confused, synthesizes a body standing slightly outside of the one it's actually in. Ah brains! Can't live with 'em, can't live without 'em!
Posted by self at 10:23 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
August 11, 2007
60 gmail scripts
Here are 60 tools that may make your gMail experience better... (Thanks to Henk Nouwens for the link, via Twitter.)
Posted by self at 11:00 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
July 27, 2007
Doc the Elder
It's Doc Searls' 60th birthday in a few days.
Sixty is old. But it wouldn't be fitting to call Doc an old man. He's not. Durn, he's spry for his age!
No, Doc isn't an old man, but he is about to become an elder. He didn't get there just by watching the years go by. He got there by working tirelessly for the public good of the Web.
Doc thus will be entitled to the perqs given to elders:
When he talks, you look up from your damn laptop.
When in an Internet cafe, Doc's packets get sent first. You can just wait in line, sonny boy.
Before your press the "post" button on your blog, you will now spend a few seconds thinking to yourself, "What would Doc say about this?" You will then obey your inner Doc.
If Doc gets crotchety on your ass, you have to sit there and take it. (Not to worry, though. Doc is one of the least crotchety people ever.)
I don't care if Doc keeps linking to the same YouTube video. You'll laugh at the end as if it were the first time.
Doc is now entitled to not reply to up to six emails a day. And he doesn't have to let us know which ones they are.
Happy birthday in a few days, and much love now, Doc!
[Tags: doc_searls village elders ]
Posted by self at 12:38 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack
July 23, 2007
Why I'm becoming a Mac person
I've used each of the Apple machines pretty much when they came out. I've owned several, most recently a Powerbook. Yet the Mac has never stuck with me. Now, my black MacBook is bringing me joy. I use my big honking Windows desktop machine only when I have to.
What happened?
I've had what I think of as legitimate reasons to find the Mac unpleasant. I don't think of Apple as a user-friendly company. The Mac's insistence on sticking with interface idiocies like shipping with a one-button mouse and only allowing drag-sizing from the bottom right-hand corner, strike me as explicable only as arrogance. I prefer Microsoft's willingness to run Windows on machines manufactured in an open market, although it does result in the chaos of drivers that is the bane of Windows' existence. The lack of software for the Mac is an issue. And then there are my idiosyncratic reasons for sticking with Windows, including the tons of utilities programs I've written for myself and my need to run a version of Powerpoint that has full path animation, which Mac Powerpoint lacks.
Likewise, I've been unpersuaded by the Mac's case against Windows. Windows XP (Microsoft's failed to give me to a good reason to switch to Vista) is quite robust and stable. Even when a program crashes, it doesn't pull down the entire operating system. If you know what you're doing, you don't get viruses. The registry is an overly-complex solution to the complexity of modern software, but it rarely gets in your way, and being able to edit it (after making a back up, of course) actually gives you some additional control over your machine. The problems Mac users rag on Windows users about generally don't hold against sufficiently sophisticated users. I have become a sufficiently sophisticated at Windows use. I've had to.
So, what's changed my mind?
Some of it has nothing to do with the Mac. In particular, I'm coming off of a Thinkpad X40, an admirably light and small laptop, which has me enjoying the MB's larger and wider screen. That's helping a lot.
The open source movement has now created great software in enough categories that I don't feel like I'm downgrading. Open Office (I'm using the NeoOffice flavor of it, which uses more of the Mac's UI and skips X11, or at least makes it invisible) now feels as good as Word; the upgrade to the spell checker, for example, has helped. Thunderbird and Firefox work just fine on the MB. The utility programs, like the text editors and FTP programs, are great, and even tend to be prettier than their Windows' counterparts. So, even though there is far less software available for the Mac, for me there's enough, and enough is all I need. And, the same is true for the non-open source stuff. The one category that matters to me that the Mac loses at is games. But I still have my honking Windows desktop for that.
The ability to run Windows on the same MB is comforting, especially during the transition. I have a 10gb partition for Windows, leaving about 140gb for Mac. I find I'm only using the Windows partition for working in Powerpoint and for retrieving items I forgot to port over. And, Parallels, which lets you run Windows in a window on your Mac desktop, may not be rock solid, but it is way cool.
I do like knowing Unix is under the hood. It enables a range of tinkering that would require far deeper knowledge in Windows. (Windows API anyone?) Of course, tinkering is how people like me get in trouble.
OS X absolutely handles some core user functions better than Windows does. When I close the lid on my Thinkpad, I can never be entirely sure what state I'm going to find the machine in when I come back. It's supposed to go into sleep mode, but it on occasion goes into either hibernation or total shutdown. And it takes way too long to come back, no matter what state it's in. This is one of those things you'd think Microsoft and hardware manufacturers would have figured out by now. On the other hand, I can close my MB and be confident that when I open it, it's going to blink its eyes once or twice and be fully awake. Likewise, my MB latches on to the strongest, open-est wifi signal without asking me to salute and sign some papers. Also, the Mac seems to be doing a better job of power management, although I'm not competent to judge this. (Hint: Turn on Parallels and watch your power drain, presumably as the Core 2 cpu #2 kicks in.)
Put it all together, and the MacBook feels great. It's solid, it's fast, the display is beautiful. Oh, I've had program crashes, and there's UI stuff that seems thick-headed (how about letting me use just one finger to delete forward? Jeez!), but, well, it's just a computer. And I'm enjoying it more than any computer since my original KayPro II.
Of course, it helped that I got it just before going on a working vacation when I could devote some serious relationship-bonding time with it. Employers ought to grant leaves of absence to users making the switch. The first couple of weeks are such an important bonding time. We ought to respect that. I hear the French give 14 days of paid leave.
Posted by self at 11:44 AM | Comments (19) | TrackBack
July 13, 2007
Lazy phishing
Among the phishing spams I got today was one addressing me as a Mid America Bank FSB customer (which I am not). Apparently there's been a little mixup with my records, and they need me to submit all of my personal information, passwords, and embarrassing photos.
These scammers are so lazy that the URL to which I'm supposed to respond doesn't even attempt to make it look like it's a bank address. In fact, the domain is:
http://svindler.dk
Well, I guess you;d have no one to blame but yourself if you fell for this one.
Posted by self at 07:53 AM | Comments (4) | TrackBack
July 08, 2007
Older than Lennon
As I write this, it is my mother in law's 80th birthday. I love her, I like her, and I enjoy being with her.
As far as arbitrary markers go, an 80th is a big deal. We've marked it by gathering the entire family, as well as the four couples known collectively as The Wine Group who have known her since high school. They are only slightly reduced by age: One couple is now a single, they are all shorter than they used to be, one of the men runs down conversational paths a little too long. Still and all, when I was a lad, eighty year olds were by and large dead, and for the survivors we had words like "dotage" and, if they were lucky, "spry." I don't know if being 56 enables me to see past the wrinkles and pates or whether we're just aging remarkably better than our grandparents did — if we are lucky enough to get to old age, a contingency that, as ever, comes without merit or mercy.
So, this morning I went for a run. Of course, if you saw me, you wouldn't say, "Oh, there's a man running!" You would have said, "Oh my god, should we get that staggering man some help?" Nevertheless, to me it feels like running. It was the first time I've run wearing my new iPod, which came basically free with my new MacBook. Yes, I am now Apple Man, right down to my iSkivvies. So, here's a Note to Self: Do not exercise while listening to John Lennon songs because it's hard to keep up one's breath while weeping.
By December 8, 1980, nothing had gone wrong in my life. My parents were middle middle class, although growing up I thought we were wealthy. None of my desires were frustrated (well, except for prom night, but that's a different story). An aunt and an uncle had died young, but I'd managed to make that feel like someone else's loss. I had convinced my draft board to make me a conscientious objector — a first for them, I was told — and even then, my lottery number didn't come up so I didn't even have to spend two years doing alternative service. I'd gone through philosophy graduate school having been warned for six years that there were very few teaching jobs available, yet in 1980 I was an assistant professor in a philosophy department. I'd married well and truly.
We were sitting in our little apartment in Portland, Oregon, when the radio announced that John Lennon had been killed.
The Beatles' story was my story, our story. It wasn't just music, although I'm ever more impressed by their talent and daring. It's hard to explain my — our — sense of identification with the Beatles. I didn't think I could have been a Beatle if only I had been in the right spot. I didn't identify with their rise from humble origins. I didn't envy their lifestyle of concerts and groupies. They were more important to my self-understanding than that. They exposed my — our — possibilities. Everything was up for reinvention, or so we thought, never dreaming that when our generation took over it'd be in the form of Bill Clinton and George Bush. The Beatles in their music, but also in their way with celebrity, said we could take the old, bust it up, make fun of it and delight in it, and build something new. Love and youth could refashion the world.
Until they shoot you.
Had any of the other Beatles been killed, it would have been sad and horrible, but it wouldn't have marked the end of my own youth. John was special.
John was doing to himself what the Beatles did to music and culture. He became a father and househusband, and started writing songs as naked as his photo on the "Two Virgins" album. I didn't like many of the songs. Some were embarrassing. And that often was the point. In fact, many of his most personal were sung at the highest reaches of his voice, as if to say, "I love you so much that I'm willing to sing badly for you." (Not that Lennon ever sang badly. I will have none of that!)
So, I was running this morning, listening to "Instant Karma," the 2-disk collection of Lennon songs sung by others, with profits going to Darfur via Amnesty International. There are performancs, particularly on the second disk, I like a lot. Green Day's "Working Class Hero," Jack Johnson's "Imagine," Ben Harper's "Beautiful Boy," Jaguares' (or Jakob Dylan's?) "Gimme Some Truth," The Postal Service's "Grow Old with Me." I'm sorry to say that I didn't like the under-represented women's tracks as much: Avril Lavigne's "Imagine" and Christina Aguilera's "Mother" both sing songs that came more directly from Lennon's voice.
The compilation makes it clear that Lennon was inconsistent. In "Imagine," he singles out religion a couple of times as a force that stands in our way. Later, he thanks God for Yoko. So he likes God but not organized religion. But then he bashes God. Oh my! What a great blogger he would have been, so eager to be imperfect in public.
I admired the perfection of Beverly Sills' singing, but I could never get past wondering how she did that with her voice, which is also my reaction to ventriloquists. I know her singing touched many, but it wasn't for me. The imperfection of Lennon's voice, his insistence on being human right in the midst of our insistence that he be John Lennon, is what got to me. Gets to me.
Mark David Chapman thought he was protecting John Lennon by killing the evil Lennon-impersonating robot outside the Dakota that December evening. Bang. Lennon isn't given the chance to be patient with his children, to tell them how beautiful they are, to grow old in their eyes.
So, here I am at 56. Our children are 25, 22, and 16. I've made it past the point where they'd be too young to remember me clearly if I died tomorrow. I find comfort in that, although I'm enough of a rationalist to find it also silly.
But, like many heading into old age, I don't feel old. I still dress as if I'm going to summer camp. Yet I remind myself — biting down on a painful tooth — that I'll be sixty soon. Fifty you can pretend is the new forty, but sixty is just freaking old. I've always avoided mirrors, but now I find myself examining my baldness to try to fix in my mind how old I look to others. Likewise, when talking with young people (a symptom of my denial about my age: It feels weird to call them "young people"), I force myself to dredge up an external image of this old man talking with the kids.
This isn't a pity thing. I think I know more than thirty years ago, and, thanks to the Net, I'm part of many networks, each of which is smarter than I am. I have more love in my life than when I could take three of flights of stairs, skipping every other step, while whistling. ("Octopus' Garden" for many years was my stairs-climbing song, even though I never liked it very much.)
But something has gone wrong. I know what the path to old age is supposed to be: You're young, you marry, you work, you retire, you become small, cute, and certain, and you die. But, here I am hanging out with 80 year olds who don't feel all that old to me. And here I am, hanging out on the Internet where no one knows you're an old dog, and where the pace on the treadmill has been turned up from cane-assisted to massively multiplayer intellectual marathon. The simple journey we're supposed to take, one of ascent and descent, has been disrupted. Only the end remains fixed.
The truth is that I don't feel myself on a path. The truth is that I don't know how old I am.
[Tags: john_lennon instant_karma beatles aging death ]
Posted by self at 11:32 AM | Comments (16) | TrackBack
June 30, 2007
Working on vacation works!
Faced with the prospect of not having any children in the house for most of July, my wife and I decided to go someplace fun in a twosome fashion. But we both feel the burden of having a good time, so we took the pressure off by deciding to work on vacation.
That means we loaded up the car with books and have headed off to my family's summer cottage, having checked with my siblings to make sure we have it to ourselves for a few days. So, I'm sitting here reading, and writing some stuff I've meant to write. At night we'll eat food we like, and see some plays at Shakespeare & Co. It is exceedingly pleasant.
On the other hand, for the next few days, I'm on dialup. (It also means that I'm using AOL. If you have a better way for me to use dialup very occasionally, let me know.) Thank goodness there are usually parking spaces outside the public library within reach of its wifi signal early in the morning when I go into town to buy groceries, newspapers, and the best sourdough bread in the country.
And now I must get back to work!
Posted by self at 09:15 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
June 23, 2007
Berkman Center on the move...literally!
Sfphil has posted photos of the old Berkman Center house being picked up and moved. (We've been in a newer building this entire academic year.) [Tags: berkman]
Posted by self at 04:03 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
June 03, 2007
The future is now, or, um, well, later
There's a video of a cool gesture-based system over at Perceptive Pixel. And there's even an electronic music soundtrack that's like annoying music from the future.
Jeff Han apparently demoed this at TED last year. Now he's got the video of the demo up on his site, with zero further info. It looks very cool, but, of course, cool UI's are not necessarily usable UI's.
So, we'll see. Sometime. I hope.
[Tags: user_interface perceptive_pixel gestures coolness]
Posted by self at 04:03 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
May 31, 2007
Yochai Benkler to join the Berkman Center
Yale's Yochai Benkler , whose The Wealth of Networks is the seminal work on the new economics of collaboration, is joining Harvard and the Berkman Center.
This is fantastic news. What an addition to our community! And not just because Yochai is brilliant. He is also kind in discussion, and that matters a lot.
[Tags: yochai_benkler berkman]
Posted by self at 11:45 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
May 19, 2007
Congratulations to the Knight winners
The Knight Foundation News Challenge has spoken to the tune of $12M in grants, and two — count 'em, two — projects sponsored by the Berkman Center are among the winners. Global Voices got a $244,000 two year grant to support its outreach program, and the Citizen Media Law Project got funded to help citizens do better journalism. Ethan's got some excellent bloggage about all this, as does Doc.
Hearty congratulations to all the winners. Lots of good projects now will be able to advance. [Tags: knight globalvoices gv berkman citizen_media journalism dan_gillmor]
Posted by self at 12:02 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
May 12, 2007
Light blogging
I've been blogging lightly - and even missed a day — because the book tour I'm on has been overwhelming. Not only is my schedule packed, but the events have been over stimulating. So many great questions. I get back to the hotel, my head a-swirl...and then I fall asleep.
I come home this weekend for our daughter's graduation, and then turn around right again and come back to SF.
Posted by self at 01:24 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
I've entered the Senior Zone
Last night the cashier at the movie theater asked me if I wanted the senior discount. That starts at 60. I'm 56, so it's a reasonable question, but it means that the gap between how old I look and how old I think I look is widening faster than I'm aging. [Tags: aging seniors self_delusion damn_boomers]
Posted by self at 10:47 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
May 04, 2007
The Freerange Librarian reviews Everything is Miscellaneous
Karen Schneider, who was one of my favorite librarians even before she reviewed Everything Is Miscellaneous, has posted her review at the American Library Association's techie site. She says the book is "dangerous." That's not an adjective I often (ever?) hear applied to anything I do — I installed a seat-belt on our LazyBoy chair — so I'm just tickled pink. [Tags: everything_is_miscellaneous karen_schneider ]
Posted by self at 10:31 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Ethanz's review
Ethan Zuckerman has posted a review of Everything is Miscellaneous. He thinks reading it is like drinking a mojito: Towards the bottom you always end up with leaves in your teeth. Ok, so maybe that wasn't the point of his metaphor, but Ethan does a great job explaining what the book is about. [Tags: ethan_zuckerman reviews]
Posted by self at 10:31 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Peter Morville's review
Peter Morville, author of the excellent and enjoyable Ambient Findability, reviews Everything is Miscellaneous. He likes it, but thinks I don't recognize that "third order," digital organizational systems are often built on top of "second order" systems. I'm sure he's right that I over-emphasize the new and scant the existing systems. I do, however, believe in mixed modes and hybrid systems that take advantage of every way of organizing information. Since we no longer have to settle on one, we should have lots. [Tags: peter_morville everything_is_miscellaneous reviews]
Posted by self at 10:31 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
February 27, 2007
John Palfrey's awesome outlining software
I believe the software John Palfrey used at the BeyondBroadcast conference is MindMap. It combines outlining with superslick presentation quality. There's an open source outliner that some compare with it called FreeMind, but on a quick look, it doesn't seem to be nearly as slick...but it's free and open source. [Tags: outliners john_palfrey everything_is_miscellaneous]
Posted by self at 04:10 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
Implicit Braille
They ought to put Braille bumps on keyboards so that after a couple of years of typing, we will all have learned Braille. Maybe. [Tags: braille blind]
Posted by self at 12:36 PM | Comments (26) | TrackBack
January 19, 2007
How to be cheap: Laptop mice
I've been going through laptop mice like a cat goes through mice. The cords fray where they join the USB plug. But my latest cheap laptop mouse has lasted for months because I applied some preemptive Goop — the viscous glue you can use to fill in a worn sneaker sole — at the join. Works like a charm. Plus, it makes it look like you just sneezed on your mouse, useful for keeping the person next to you on the plane curled up in the far side of his seat. [Tags: tips goop mice]
Posted by self at 02:36 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack
January 10, 2007
Joho just got easier to remember
I've owned the www.JohoTheBlog.com domain for years, and for years I've had a redirect that sends you to www.hyperorg.com/blogger/index.html. Now, my friendly and helpful host has made an alias so www.JohoTheBlog.com goes directly to the right page, with no redirect hiccup. Go ahead, give it a try: www.JohoTheBlog.com. See, you're back where you started. What will they think of next?
If you already have a link here, first: Thanks! And there's no need to change a thing. In fact, you're pointing at the honest-to-TBL, unaliased address. But, from now I'll be telling people the link to my blog is www.JohoTheBlog.com.
Posted by self at 12:12 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
January 06, 2007
Hi-resolution Boston
Here's an amazingly high res photographic image (a series of tiles, actually) of Boston. [Tags: boston]
Posted by self at 09:34 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
January 04, 2007
Fever-based OCD
I spent all last night obsessively composing (or was I dreaming that I was composing?) this blog post that explains that I spent all last night trying to get my body into exactly the right configuration so I could fall asleep. If a single fold of blanket were wrong, I had to fix it, but in so doing, I would knock some other element out of kilter. But the obsessive micromanagement of my bedware was only part of the obsession. The rest of it was the focus on writing this post. (And, no, this is not exactly the post I composed while obsessing. For one thing, it's more meta than that.)
I honestly don't know if I fussed all night or if I only dreamed that I did.
Less fever today. I'm actually going to tackle my email this morning, before my extended fasting (yes, I'm drinking water) makes me loopier than I already am.
Our son came down with it last night. He seems to be about six hours behind me. He does not moan. [Tags: illness fever tmi]
Posted by self at 11:07 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
January 03, 2007
Son of Frank: Meteor Farmer
Frank Paynter's son, Ben, has a story about meteor farmingin the Jan. issue of Wired that's been turned into a segment of the premiere of PBS's Wired Science. The show is being streamed here. [Tags: ben_paynter frank_paynter meteors pbs video]
Posted by self at 02:17 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
December 18, 2006
Blog Tag. I'm it.
Oy. Glenn Fleishman has tagged me in a game of blog tag. The rules say that I now have to post five things most people don't know about me. I then get to tag five other bloggers.
Five things:
1. I hate fish so much that even before I was a vegetarian, I'd sometimes lie that I have an allergy to them. (I like feeding fish, however.) I will leave the table (without making a fuss) if seated across from someone reverse engineering a lobster or crab.
2. I am afflicted with a malady that requires me to tap along to any beat, including directional signals.
3. I've played almost every first person shooter there is. My player name is "Target," which gives you an idea how good I am.
4. I am a closet hobbyist programmer. But because I have difficulty with indirect relationships such as pointers, I couldn't get from C to C++. To my great embarrassment, I currently program mainly in Visual Basic.
5. I was on the student-faculty committee at Bucknell U. that came up with the idea of letting students design their own major, and I was in the first graduating class that could take advantage of this opportunity. And that, ladies and gentlemen, explains why I graduated Bucknell as a Meaning major.
I tag Euan Semple, Denise Howell, Chris "RageBoy" Locke, Jeneane Sessum and Susan Crawford... [Tags: blogtag]
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December 02, 2006
My brother's honor, and takin' the midnight train
I'm in NJ tonight for my brother's award ceremony. He's Rheumatologist of the Year, an award he earned by caring about his patients and not processing them like flounder. He's also the most ethical person I've met and damn smart, too. He's getting an honor he richly deserves. (Yay, Andy!)
Then I take the 3:20am train from Newark to DC for Day 2 of the RootsCamp unconference. If you're there, I'll be easy to find: I'll be the incredibly cranky old man in the corner. [Tags: andrew_weinberger rootscamp]
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November 28, 2006
One Laptop Per Child
SJ Klein is giving us a quick overview of the One Laptop Per Child project.
They have deals with five countries: Argentina, Brazil, Libya, Nigeria and Thailand. Each will be getting 1,000 laptops.
The monitor can run in ultra-low-power mode, reflecting ambient light. "The display technology is the most remarkable technology in the laptop." The display "IP" is co-owned with the screen producers.The OLPC is working to make it reusable in 3 years wrt patents.
It weighs 3lbs. A pound of that is plastic. The plastic is 2mil instead of the 0.7mil of a typical laptop, e.g., a Thinkpad.
It comes with Squeak, JavaScript and Python as programming languages. And MediaWiki. (And more.)
Q: What is it missing? What will the critics say, "It's fine, but it's missing a ____"?
A: It's not a normal desktop computer. It has a 512MB flash disk and 128Mb of RAM. It can run lots of apps simultaneously, but not typical office apps.
It has an integrated browser.
Q: Does it run Flash?
A: Yes. There's a lot out there in Flash. But it's not an open format.
Ethan points out that the bulk of the machine is behind the screen, so there isn't a lot passing through the hinge; the hinge is the most common point of failure in laptops.
SJ says that the battery runs about 2 hours if you're running flat out. But for reading, he hopes and thinks kids will get about 8 hours. The best recharging technique is a pull thingy that's sort of like a lawn mower starter. The battery is nickel metal hydride.
It's designed to last six years.
Q: (Me) The social software?
A: WikiMedia. Drawing/chat program that lets you see everyone that's there is part of the operating environment (= Sugar). Etc. [Sounds like an opportunity. What social software might work in these environments and cultures?]
Ethan worries about students wanting to use them to the max while the teachers want to confine the usage to class-focused activities. Ethan doesn't want the laptops to assume that education has to be entirely webby and non-traditional.
The OS is a modified version of Fedora. The file system is different because it's compact flash. E.g., you can't use swap and they've had to write low-level stuff to keep Linux from writing to the first sectors of memory until it burns out.
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November 14, 2006
Note to the three guys in suits at the table behind me
Talk loud. Be foul-mouthed. But please not both.
Neither would be ok, too.
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November 09, 2006
Tab catalog for Firefox
I've been using Tab Catalog for a while, but it seems to have gotten better. I'm not sure if that's because the Firefox 2.0 version was upgraded or because somehow my preferences got switched, but I'm enjoying it a lot in either case.
Tab Catalog shows thumbnails of the pages in your tab bar. So rather than having to rely on the truncated names in the tabs, you can go for the gestalt. Since I often have twenty or thirty tabs, being able to see the pages themselves is very helpful. Very cool. And free, of course.
Thank you, Shimoda Hiroshi. [Tags: tab_catalog firefox utilities tabs]
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November 04, 2006
Zotero research tool
Zotero (zo-TAIR-oh) is a Firefox 2.0 extension that captures Web pages (and files and PDFs), finds the citation info on those pages and puts them into standard bibliographicv form, lets you take notes, and lets you search. In future versions, it plans on letting you publish your collection and will integrate with Microsoft Word and others. It's free and it's Open Source.
I haven't tried it yet, but I'm liking the sound of it a lot. (Here are the specs for my dream system, which I once called Notetella, but which I suppose now I'd have to call note.licio.us because, well, that's the law.) (Thanks to Luis Villa for the link.) [Tags: zotero research bibliographic ]
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October 30, 2006
Rosenberg interviews Johnson
Scott Rosenberg has a great interview with Steve Johnson about Steve's new book, The Ghost Map. It's one smart writer interviewing another smart writer. Plus, Scott and Steve are both really nice, a virtue often under appreciated, especially when it shows up in folks whose egos could justifiably be way bigger than they are.
Scott closes with a question about Steve's new site, Outside.in that aggregates stuff by zip code. [Tags: steve_johnson ghost_map scott_rosenberg books]
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October 24, 2006
The world's most boring man
Yesterday I flew from Boston to Chicago in the window seat of a three-across row. The person next to me, who seemed to be a vigorous man of around seventy, talked non-stop the entire way. Non-stop. He's done a lot of traveling, he has a lot of opinions.
I saw what was coming and ducked out quickly, donning a head set and pretending to work and listen to music. But I felt terrible for the woman in the aisle seat who absorbed the blunt force of the man's self-absorbed river of spews. I wondered if I should make up an excuse for her or engage him in "conversation" so she could have a break. But I lacked the fortitude. Besides, she's a grownup — maybe in her late forties — and should know how to break it off politely.
So, here's the twist ending. It's not exactly O. Henry, but...
About two hours in, the man went to the bathroom. I leaned over and asked the woman if she was ok.
"What do you mean?" she asked.
"He hasn't stopped talking. Omigod!"
"I'm enjoying it."
Maybe I would have thought so if I had been willing to listen. Maybe I missed an opportunity.
On the other hand, as we were leaving the plane, the man skipped ahead. "You're a nice person," I said to the woman. And the woman directly behind her said, "And how!" [Tags: misc]
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October 19, 2006
A nice moment on line
Coming back to the US from Toronto, you clear customs and immigration in the Toronto airport. Tonight, all the US passport holders were all standing in one line — maybe 20 of us — when an Immigration person told us to split into two parallel lines to take advantage of the two open desks. The guy who was seventh in line now became the first in the new line, taking the next 7 or 8 people behind him. But, because our new leader was a fair and wise leader, he let the next six people on the original line go ahead of us. Only when the woman who had been ahead of him had been served did he go through Immigration.
I thought this was so cool it was practically Canadian! [Tags: politeness americans canada toronto line_integrity]
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October 18, 2006
How to tell you're in a summer resort in October
Today in the lovely summer resort of Chatham, as I went for a run between 7:10 and 7:43am, all the vehicles that passed me on the road were pickup trucks. [Tags: chatham]
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October 16, 2006
I see dead people
My sister took me to the Body Worlds 2 exhibit at the Museum of Science in Boston. That's the one where dead bodies have been plasticized (plastinated, technically), dissected and posed. I found it interesting, impressive, awesome, creepy, creepy, and obscene.
Interesting because you get to see how we're put together.
Impressive because the craft requires such meticulous work.
Awesome because some of the exhibits make us seem so improbable. In particular, one exhibits shows nothing but the feathery lattice of the head's blood circuitry.
Creepy because they're dead people. Or, possibly, they are dead people whose bodies have been entirely displaced by plastic, in which case the exhibits aren't so creepy but the process of creating them is.
Creepy because the creator, Gunther von Hagens, has spent a few decades dissolving corpses in acid baths for profit. Oh, and for education. (The exhibit tickets are $24 and the marketing is slick.)
Obscene because seeing a dissected person teaches you something, but seeing a whole, skinned dead person posed as a ballerina or as someone kicking a soccer ball treats a dead person like a meat mannikin.
The Wikipedia article on Body Worlds is very interesting, particularly the part about how the creator has asserted that his cadavers' poses are copyrighted.
[Tags: body_worlds a href="http://www.technorati.com/tags/copyright" rel="tag"> copyright anatomy exhibits ]
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October 11, 2006
Timo Hannay of Nature to talk at Berkman
I'm looking forward to Timo Hannay's upcoming Tuesday lunch talk at the Berkman Center. Timo is Director of Web Publishing at Nature magazine and has been involved in some of Nature's forward-looking projects. He's going to talk about what the Web means to science. This should nicely complement Dan Burk's talk on open science, which was more concerned with legal issues about patent and copyright than Timo's is likely to be. If you want to attend, you should rsvp at rsvp@cyber.law.harvard.edu. The talk will be on Oct. 17, 12:30-1:45, at the Berkman offices at 23 Everett Street in Cambridge. Sessions are also Web cast and Second Lifed. [Tags: berkman science timo_hannay nature_magazine]
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October 09, 2006
Google Map fun
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John Lennon's looks
I've never gotten over John Lennon. I still can't listen to his music without choking up. As the media hype his birthday, I was struck this morning by the obvious fact that, in addition to everything else, he looked so cool. Image after image.
Is that the least of it? Yes, but an integral aspect of the most of it. [Tags: john_lennon beatles]
Posted by self at 10:56 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
October 02, 2006
A Yom Kippur tale
Jeff Gates relates a Yom Kippur tale that's as heart-warming as an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm. In fact, it's explicitly a Larry David-ish take. I enjoyed it, and not just because of the massive jetlag and fizzy-headedness caused by a combination of getting up at 4am Dutch time (= 9pm real time), flying all day, and not eating since some time but I can't figure out when at this point.
(If I had any guts, my Daily Open-Ended Puzzle would be: Why the hell am I fasting? But, I figure that's maybe not such a great way to mark the Kippur of Yom. Oy, I am so going to hell.) [Tags: jeff_gates yom_kippur larry_david]
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October 01, 2006
Yom Kippur
Yom Kippur is about to begin here at the airport Sheraton in Amsterdam. (The worst way to handle a day of fasting: Fly west across 7 time zones.) Yom Kippur is the day of atonement so: If I've done badly by you, please let me know how I can make it right (beginning by apologizing to you).
No, I'm not kidding. Take it off line: self
evident.com [Tags: yom_kippur atonement]
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September 26, 2006
Dear Kid, here's what you should know...
DDearKid.org is a wiki where you can create a page with some wisdom you now know that you wish someone had told you when you were twelve. [Tags: dearkid wiki advice]
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September 19, 2006
The opposite of the Giant Zero
I'm sorry to be out of town for Doc's Berkman talk. All I know about it is that it's called "The Giant Zero," which plays on Craig Burton's idea of the Net as a hollow sphere where all are an equal distance from all others (which Doc and I appropriated in World of Ends), and David Isenberg's Stupid Network.
And since I seem to be in the mood for opposites, this reminded me of something that struck me—but I don't know why—in James Gleick's excellent biography of Newton. Among the mind-boggling list of Newton's mind-boggling insights, Gleick mentions that Newton had to figure out the summed gravitational effect of all the particles that make up a sphere like the earth. Newton showed mathematically that the summed gravity pulls towards the center of the earth, which now seems obvious, and which accorded with the Aristotelian theory Newton overthrew. But I was struck by how not obvious it must have been to everyone except Newton.
Unrelated to Doc's talk, I know. It's not even a good opposite. But I am jetlagged enough to think it worth blogging random associations. (For example: I liked David Berlinski's Newton's Gift better than Gleick's because Berlinski explains Newton's steps slow enough for a humanities major to follow, although I certainly like Gleick's.) Your randomness may vary.
Good night. [Tags: doc_searls newton internet]
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My Hundred Million Dollar Secret, the young adult novel I self-published through lulu.com is now listed on Amazon. Cool! (It's cheaper through lulu, though. And it's online for free.) (I posted step-by-step instructions on getting an ISBN through lulu.)
Posted by self at 11:07 AM
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I met Craig in the mid-1980s when I worked at Interleaf and the Seybold Seminars was our major industry event. Craig was knowledgeable, helpful, honest and friendly. He died way too young, leaving a wife and six children.
Tim Bray shares some good memories of Craig.
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Andy Carvin is asking people to help him decide how to lay out his and Susanne's new apartment by downloading a copy of the apartment plan and uploading an edited version of it.
All I know is that he ought to hang Bradsucks' guitar — decorated via a similar process — in a prominent place [Tags: open_source_design bradsucks andy_carvin]
Posted by self at 11:38 PM
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StopBadWare.org, an organization sponsored in part by the Berkman Center, has put AOL 9.0 onto its list of malefactors because
it installs additional software without telling the user, it forces the user to take certain actions, it adds various components to Internet Explorer and the taskbar without disclosure, it may automatically update without the user's consent, and it fails to uninstall completely. That's a big, gutsy step. But don't those same criteria mean that Windows XP should be on the list? [Tags: stopbadware aol ]
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In the new issue of my newsletter, I have a small review of RoboForm, a password manager for Windows that I've gotten quite attached to. It's full featured and works without getting in the way. I like it a lot. But...
Among its features, it will generate obscure passwords for you, useful for the lazy ones among us (i.e., all but the 1% of us who are Data Saints) who use the same passwords everywhere. (Software like RoboForm thus brings us the "single sign-on" benefit that is one of the selling points of identity management platforms, but that's a different hobby horse.) I haven't been using the auto-password-generator, however, because RoboForm has no export capability. If I use it for a few years, I could have hundreds of finger-twistin' passwords. If I want to switch to a different password manager, I'd have to type them in manually, an annoying, error-prone process.
(Mea Culpa: In my newsletter, I take RoboForm to task for not even having a way of printing out the passwords. I was wrong. David Teare, the creator of 1Password, a Mac password manager that imports from RoboForm, wrote to let me know that there is a way to print out RoboForm passwords. Then 1Password scrapes the html print file. David says 1Password is adding an export capability. PS: I'd sent the RoboForm PR person a message asking about this, but I only gave them two days to get back to me.)
I don't mean to pick on RoboForm, for it is exceptionally friendly in its day-to-day use. Microsoft Word, which says it will support the Open Document Format but still doesn't, is a more important target. Every app should make it easy — not just possible, but easy — for a user to break up with it. It's our time and information. If there isn't a standard format for the interchange of information for that particular application area, then a documented, comma-delimited file would be a big step forward. There's also this new standard called "XML" I believe that seems to be catching on with the youngsters. But for Lord's sake, let us have our data.
We should not have been allowed to advance to Web 2.0 until every app gave us that basic Web 0.0 way of moving data around.
We won't love you unless you let us leave you. [Tags: roboform 1password odf]
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danah is compiling a list of people researching social network sites....
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I just published my novel for haflings (or "young adults" if you prefer), called My 100 Million Dollar Secret. It's about a boy who wins $100,000,000 in the lottery, but (for reasons explained) can't let his parents know and refuses to lie to them. In another sense, it's about the boy's growing sense of the moral obligations that come with having so much dang money. It's also supposed to be a little funny.
I published it through Lulu.com, the on-demand self-publishing outfit. You can get a nicely designed paperback (thank you, Stellio!) for $13.90 plus shipping, or you can read it online there for $4.00. Or you can read it online for free at my site for the book. Or you can download a Word or PDF version for free. There's also a Google group for anyone who wants to talk about it. (The book is licensed under Creative Commons, although I must have pressed the wrong button at Lulu because there it says it's got a plain old copyright. I intend the CC rules to be in effect.)
Thanks to the people who read it and commented on it before I posted it!
[Tags: my100million novel kids_books fiction lulu]
Posted by self at 09:00 PM
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Say you're a middle-aged man who's just a little concerned that his heart is going to seize while he's out on a run. Or that the bear that's been clawing through garbage pails at night is going to wake up and decide to have a morning snack of Very Slow Runner. Or that you'll accidentally step on the beloved Agamemnon of warrior ants and they will come tearing after you armed with tiny tridents and head-mounted lasers. It could happen, and if it did, you'd want help pronto!
You don't want to carry your cellphone with you because, well, think of the amount of energy it'd take to throw your phone the length of the distance you run. Why, your little arms would be all worn out. No, what you'd like is an eensy-weensy, low-featured, clip-on phone, preferably shaped like the always-stylish lima bean.
Introducing the OOMPH — Out Only Micro PHone.
The OOMPH is the size and shape of a lima bean. It has no screen, no dial pad, and just two buttons: On/Off and 911. Press the On button and it calls a service center that charges you a buck or two to call whatever number you tell them to. (It's got a tiny speaker. Maybe you stick the whole thing in your ear canal when you make a call. I haven't thought this through yet.) Press the 911 button and it lets you gasp your final words to an emergency operator who is thinking about his next coffee break.
The OOMPH2 lets you record a voice message that gets played when you press the 911 button. You can even update it with oral notes such as "Just passed the TastiCreme on Ave. C. Mmmm. TastiCreme."
The OOMPH3 does GPS so the EMTs know where to come to collect the body.
The OOMPH4 is the size of an iPod Nano and plays MP3s. In fact, let's say the OOMPH4 is an iPod Nano with an OOMPH3 built into it.
The OOMPH5 has so many features that you have to tow it in a small cart.
OOMPH — The Lima Bean that Could Save Your Life!
(If I had a nickel for every million dollar idea I've had, I'd be rich by now!) [Tags: misc]
Posted by self at 09:39 AM
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In seven minutes, Feynman — considered by many to be one of the great teachers — explains the wavy world we live in. [Tags: physics richard_feynman]
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Mel, Mel, Mel. What are we going to do with you, my boy?
I do appreciate your apology and your offer to meet with leaders of the Jewish community. But I think you've got it wrong.
But so do the leaders of the Jewish comunity cited by the newspapers who say they first want Mel to go visit some death camps.
Here's what I would do.
First, Mel, get yourself sober. Do the Twelve Steps. Keep them up. I have trust in your ability to do this. I know you love your family. dlo it for them. (The cited Jewish community leaders agree with this advice.)
Then, skip the death camps for now. If you're really a Holocaust denier, you won't be convinced, because you probably believe that some Jews were murdered in the camps, just not six million of us. Besides, the death camp tour is unseemly. Get your ticket stamped at six death camps and you're cured of anti-Semitism? It don't work that way. And, frankly, the cited Jewish leaders are confusing being a Jew with being a victim. Your beliefs about the Holocaust are secondary.
The conspiracy theory you use to explain why the rest of the world has been duped about the holcaust is, on the other hand, primary .What's really dangerous, Mel, is your apparent belief that Jews are diabolical. Your portrayal of us in your pain-porn film did real harm in the world. Even worse is your belief that not only did my folks kill your G-d, but my folks are still the money-grubbing, law-without-heart, unevolved folks your folks outgrew.
So, here's what I'd have you do, Mel. Screw meeting with Jewish leaders. Put off the death camp tour until it'll mean something to you other than taking a private jet to a half dozen penitential photo opps. Instead, start going to shul. A little shul like the one my wife and son go to. Hang out there with a bunch of old Yids who wouldn't recognize you if you came dressed up as Mad Max. They'll notice you eventually. Explain you're a Christian interested in learning about Judaism. They'll half ignore you and half teach you. Maybe stay for some Torah discussion. Definitely try the herring.
Mel, this isn't the religion you think it is. It's not Christianity-without-Christ. It's something really different. And really rather wonderful, even to an agnostic like me and, I'm confident, to a Jew-hater like you. [Tags: mel_gibson judaism anti-semitism]
Posted by self at 01:57 PM
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The Berkshire Eagle today explains how "the heat index" is computed. Saying it's like wind-chill, the paper explains that it "combines air temperature and relative humidity to dermine how hot it actually feels to the body."
...Except that wind chill calculates the cooling effect of wind, while the heat index does not. Presumably that's because we're interested in indices that make the weather out to be as unpleasant as possible: The wind chill lets us maximize how cold it feels while the heat index maximizes how hot it feels.
Boo hoo. Whatta bunch of babies we are! [Tags: weather self-pity]
Posted by self at 12:39 PM
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I met Murray Bookchin once. It was around 1970 at a national student political conference in Colorado. He had written a book, Post Scarcity Anarchism, that was important to us. I met him as he was walking into an auditorium to give a talk. It was a dark night. There were pines. He was to me a grownup; I know now that he was about fifty. I said something. I don't remember what, but it was undoubtedly fanlike and self-serious. He seemed glad that I interrupted him. He looked me in the eye. He listened. He treated me like a person worth talking with.
All in all, maybe twenty seconds. But I never forgot his presumption that a long-haired kid he didn't know was worthy of his respect. Unearned respect. It's a lot like love.
Rest in peace, Murray Bookchin. [Tags: murray_bookchin]
Posted by self at 11:45 AM
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I've now been through the process of publishing a book at Lulu and getting an ISBN from them. The process is necessarily convoluted and their wizards are unncessarily confusing. But it can be done.
Getting an ISBN from Lulu requires paying them $99 for the optional Global Distribution package. You can only do that after you've stepped through their publishing process. Only then are you given the ISBN. You then have to assign the ISBN to a new edition. Then you upload the updated materials for the new edition, including a cover and front page with the ISBN number on them.
Here's a step by step:
Use a service such as barcode-us.com to turn the ISBN number into a bar code. They charge $10 to email you a high resolution EPS file which you can then stick onto the back cover of your book.
(I ran these steps past the helpful support person on their live help chat line, and he approved.)
Posted by self at 03:53 PM
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I passingly daydreamed this morning about winning a new Hummer in a contest advertised on one of the items in our refrigerator. After paying the tax, what the hell would I do with a Hummer? Selling itwould just pass its demonic demand for fuel on to someone else.
No, the only moral option would be to dismantle it and bury its parts in graveyards scattered across multiple continents. But then, one day in the not so distant future, a call might be issued via SkyNet, and the pieces of all the buried Hummers would claw their way out of their graves and assemble themselves into a robotic army to claim the Earth as their destiny.
Maybe they'd make nice planters instead.
[Tags: hummers environment al_gore]
While I'm going all Hollywood, I had an idea this morning for the next blockbuster, so I'm blogging this to stake my claim on this Billion Dollar Idea™.
It's a movie called "No See 'Ems." (Yes, I had this idea while out running, trying to breath by only exhaling.) Swarms of teensy bugs mutate. Get bitten by a bunch of them - you never know they're there - and at first you feel really good, but then you slowly deteriorate into Pennzoil engine gunk. (The product tie-ins alone could finance the movie!) Once the government is persuaded by hunky Drs. Jolie and Pitt that the threat is real, they send in a heavily armed hit squad, led personally by Gov. Ahnuld. He unleashes the heavy personal mounted atop his Hummer, but they're just wee bugs. And you can't see 'em. So, Ahnold gets the Pennzoil treatment. The crisis grows until we figure out their one vulnerability, which is Raid (product placement bonanza!), or fly swatters,or circling the globe with sticky paper, or some damn thing. All I know is that it requires Dr. Jolie to fight in a strategically torn medical outfit and things go blowy-uppy at the end.
"No See 'Ems - The invisible enemy is inside us!" Coming soon to a theater near you.
Posted by self at 10:42 AM
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Why believe Wikipedia?:Wikipedia is credible. Not always. Not in every detail. But nothing passes that bar except perhaps for some stuff scratched into stone tablets. What is the source of Wikipedia's credibility? Oddly, it has something to do with its willingness to admit fallibility. Simply appearing in the Encyclopedia Britannica confers authority on an article. Simply appearing in Wikipedia does not, because you might hit the 90 second stretch before some loon's rewriting of history or science is found and fixed. Yet, Wikipedia is in some ways as reliable as the Britannica, and in some ways it is more reliable. Where does it get its authority? There are a few reasons we'll accept a Wikipedia article as credible... The end of the story (Or: The tyranny of rectangles:
Journalism can't get stories right because the world doesn't fit into rectangles. If you've ever been part of a story covered by a newspaper, it's a near certainty that you didn't think the story got it exactly right. Even if there were no outright mistakes, you read it thinking that the emphasis was wrong, that it didn't quite capture all sides, that there was more to the story, that a turn of phrase was prejudicial. You would have written it slightly differently. At least. This is not because reporters aren't good at their job. By and large they are, and it is hard job requiring skill, experience and persistence. It also generally doesn't pay that well. The problem is not with the reporters. Lord bless them and multiply them. The problem is with the notion of "the story." ...
Book report (Or: My obsession):
The first draft of my book is done. Here's a brief report on Chapter 8. ...One odd manifestation of my obsession is that I never get to a point where I'm ready to talk about the book...
Walking the Walk: Raytheon tags. And taxonomizes.
Posted by self at 04:29 PM
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From the press release:
Socialtext, the first Wiki company, releases Socialtext Open at the O'Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON). Available for immediate download, Socialtext Open is the first open source wiki with a commercial venture as its primary contributor. Over 2,000 businesses run Socialtext Wiki products today as a hosted service or appliance.
Based on the same great product, Socialtext Open is released under a standard open source license, and contains all of Socialtext's enterprise grade code aside from enterprise management and enterprise integration tools. Socialtext also announced the availability of its Technical Professional Service, a new SOAP API and the Socialtext Open Roadmap for the next three months. See the Socialtext blog. (Disclosure: Today's announcement makes me proud to be an advisor to Socialtext. (Note: I had no part in the strategy.))
Technorati, to whom I'm also an advisor, has launched a big bucket of new features. I particularly like the search refinement tool. And they do a nice job when you look up your own blog. Under the surface, Technorati is making it easier for partners to use its data, which is good all around.
I'm not nearly as enthusiastic about the new design of the home page. The personalization helps, but it's difficult to tell that it's a site for searching through 50M blogs. Instead, it looks like it wants to be a media site that shows you "what everyone is blogging about." The site's focus on what bloggers with "authority" care about over-emphasizes the "short head" at the expense of the long tail. So, nope, I'm not a fan of that part of the makeover.
Past the home page, some of the the new stuff is both cool and useful...the best sort of tech. [Tags: wikis socialtext open_source technorati]
Posted by self at 03:03 PM
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We've been through two tanks of gas with our new Toyota Yaris, and it's getting 24 mpg in the city instead of the rated 34. We haven't done enough highway driving to know if it's going to get near to the 40 mpg the sticker promised us. Do new cars still have break in periods, or is our disappointment likely to be perpetual? (FWIW, it's a manual shift.) [Tags: cars yaris]
Later that day: I just did 120 miles on the highway on 3.1 gallons of gas, so highway efficiency is as rated.
Posted by self at 09:34 AM
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Britt Blaser just pointed me to the Simile Timeline. It's 100% Web 2.0 compliant: Open Source, AJAX-based, and compares itself to Google Maps.
The example on the site is a cool timeline of the JFK assassination. The site also points to an example of a Jewish-Christian timeline(s).
You can create your own by building an XML file in the particular, documented format it expects. [Tags: web2 timeline simile]
Posted by self at 05:51 PM
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As the BerkmanCenter moves physically, so too has its site for audio recordings. Some excellent stuff there. For example, right now I'm listening to Benjamin Hyde talk about what we can learn about "intellectual property" from Benjamin Franklin. [Tags: berkman podcast lewis_hyde ben_franklin digital_rights]
Posted by self at 12:47 PM
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Horrifying and shameful. I hope the government of the United States will provide whatever aid is needed. In any case, I know the people of America stand ready to help. (Maybe President Bush will get around to saying something about this human tragedy.) Mumbai help blog and wiki. [Tags: mumbai]
Posted by self at 07:09 PM
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Jon writes about why he uses a modern old-fashioned push mower.
I use handclippers about twice a season and tell my neighbors that my puppetmaster, Al Gore, demands clumpy meadows. [Tags: lawns gardens lazy_bastards]
Posted by self at 06:23 PM
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Can it really be that among the 20 billion pages that Google indexes, not a single one contains the phrase "won't switch windows"? A search for that phrase, in quotes, yields nuthin', and I have the screen capture to prove it...
Yahoo turns up a mere 7. Msn turns up 3.
This seems to me to be weird.
(In case you're wondering, I'm having trouble today switching from one window to another, in XP. Clicking on inactive Windows doesn't activate them, unless I go to Task Manager first. I don't have to do anything in Task Manager, just open it via ctl-alt-del. It's intermittent and annoying. I'm guessing it's something that's starting up automatically. I'm working on it...) [Tags: google]
Posted by self at 01:57 PM
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I'm posting this not because many of you care but in hopes that it'll help the topic show up in Google for someone who does.
I'm working on publishing my kids' novel, My Hundred Million Dollar Secret, at Lulu.com. There's lots to like about Lulu, but not their instructions for how to use an ISBN number (well, technically "number" is redundant in the phrase "ISBN number) with their Global Distribution package. The problem is that it seems like you have to submit your finished book and cover in order to get an ISBN, which means that you can't include the ISBN in your finished book and cover. So, I posted on the lulu forums and Elmore Hammes, a Lulu power poster, replied. Here's what he said:
[NOTE: I just went through the process and have posted my own step-by-step guide - July 27, 2006]
There is quite a bit of information on this in the HELP pages and the Forums, and it can be confusing. Here's a sort-of-lucid summary for using Global with a wraparound cover:
1. Go through publish process, uploading your interior document and your wraparound cover. Hope that helps. It does indeed. Thanks, Elmore!
Posted by self at 09:42 AM
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Gutenkarte mashes together the public domain literature at Project Gutenberg and MetaCarta's geolocator that scans the text and plots the place references on a map. Pretty durn cool. It's even AJAX-y. There are some other projects of a similar Web 2.0 ilk over at MetaCarta Labs. (Disclosure: I did some consulting work for MetaCarta a while ago.) [Tags: project_gutenberg maps gis metacarta web2.0 gutenkarte]
Posted by self at 04:46 PM
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(Disclosure: I am just not a Las Vegas sort of person.)
I'm at a resort at Las Vegas Lake for the day to give a talk at a company's annual user meeting. LV Lake, about half an hour from LV, is a built around a long, skinny lake. The place seems to be patterned on Florence, complete with a Ponte Vecchio spanning the lake. Nothing that 400 years and a Renaissance wouldn't make interesting.
At every intersection in the "village" there are small water fountains, about half the size of a kid's wading pool, with little spritzes of water shooting up from them. At least they architects didn't go into full Trevi Emulation Mode when designing them. The amazing thing to me is that into every one of these pools visitors have thrown some coins. So, we can now add to the table of equivalences: Gambling in a Las Vegas casino = Walking through a Las Vegas casino with a hole in your pocket = Leaving a tip for a mobster = Losing your wallet = Throwing money into a Las Vegas fountain.
Actually, I'm assuming the coins in these fountains came from tourists. Maybe they're seed coins placed there by the casinos. But if they're real, they're a form of meta-gambling: Toss money into the water so that hyou'll have better luck tossing money into slot machines. In fact, as the world turns more meta, here's a meta-gambling ploy I'm surprised the casinos haven't hit on yet:
The only place I could get breakfast agt 6am this morning was in a casino. On the way out, I tried to find a slot machine into which I could put a quarter, because the reptilian portion of my brain responded to the twinkling lights. But the machines only take bills or vouchers. And since they pay out only in a voucher you redeem for money — bring back the analog cash! — they let you bet uneven increments. Anyway, let's say you buy a $100 voucher. Why not have some slot machines next to the cashier that don't pay out in money but instead increase your odds at the other machines? Meta-gambling!
(Someone please inform Captain Copyright and his good friend Reichsmarschall Patent that I own this idea. Thank you.)
[Tags: whines las_vegas gambling casinos florence]
Posted by self at 11:14 AM
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Ian Reardon is taking Craigslist RSS feeds and populating a GoogleMap of Boston with apartment listings.
Nice. [Tags: craigslist mashup google_maps web2.0 ian_reardon]
Posted by self at 01:25 PM
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In this new theory, which is from that used on modern "stealth" bombers, which bounce radar off their surfaces so they cannot be seen, an object would be encased in a shell of metamaterials and they would create an illusion akin to a mirage, said David Schurig of Duke University in North Carolina, who worked on a second report, which also appears in the latest Science journal.
"Think of space as a woven cloth," Schurig said. "Imagine making a hole in the cloth by inserting a pointed object between the threads without tearing them."
The light, or microwaves, or radar would travel along the threads of the cloth, ending up behind the object without having touched it. - Xinhuanet So, boring turns out to be the secret to invisibility in both the material and online worlds...
Unfortunately, being interesting does not guarantee visibility in the online one.
Posted by self at 08:15 AM
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The print-only journal for crazed logophiles, WordWays, has a new issue out. In it are such delights as:
Jeff Grant updates the explanations of some of the words in his 10x10 word square, which includes the "word" "Alan Browne," an American Bank consultant listed in the 1988-89 Who's Who in America. Sorry, Jeff, it still seems like cheating to me.
Eric Chaikin finds a sentence in Entertainment Weekly that inadvertently contains all the letters of the alphabet in just 61 letters. Thank goodness for Joaquin Phoenix!
Anil invents anacrograms: "Take the initial letter of each word in a common phrase, saying or longer quote, rearrange them and form a word or phrase that summarises or relates to it." He calculates the fequencies of first letters in Dickens, Melville, Twain and Ian Watson.
Mike Keith reports on the results of a program he wrote to arrange the 100 tiles in Scrabble into four 5x5 double word squares (i.e., different words going across and down), using only words accepted in Scrabble. In twenty hours, his computer found 121.
Rex Gooch invents and finds antidextrous words, i.e., a word whose first half contains letters only from the second half of the alphabet, and whose second half contains letters only from the first half. E.g., unsuppliable, unoutspeakable, pronunciable, and sunnyside egg. Examples of ambidextrous words include bladder-snout and ambidextrous itself.
Jeremy Morse analyzes the frequency with which letters are not included in the 25,000 crosswords run in the London Daily Telegraph since 1925.
A Ross Eckler, the editor, has a fun piece on books about words we need or words we don't need. "Blurb" comes from a 1914 book on words we need. "Ucalegon" — "a neighbor whose house is on fire" — is a word from Webster's Second Unabridged that we could probably replace with "Hey, get out of your freaking house! It's on fire!"
WordWays so needs to be a blog! [Tags: wordways linguistics puzzles]
Posted by self at 10:51 AM
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In a remarkably sad story, Camp Jabberwocky (posts here here and here) — the Martha's Vineyard miracle of a camp for the severely disabled — has been split in two. Most of the campers and counselors are going to a new camp on Nantucket. The issue that split the camp sounds hardly worth it: Whether counselors can have a beer or a glass of wine after hours. But it was just the proxy for far deeper, Shakespearean conflicts.
May both their houses flourish, although I suspect the magic has moved to Nantucket. [Tags: jabberwocky cp]
Posted by self at 03:43 PM
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I had my first colonoscopy today. They didn't find anything, except a piece of fruitcake I ate in 1978. But I figured if Katie Couric can show her colon on national TV to encourage people to get checked, then I can talk about mine.
In colonoscopy, they stick a garden hose up your ass and take a peek. Your are narcotized into an odd and enjoyable state of semi-awareness. The after-effects of the procedure are gassiness — one of the benefits is that for a couple of hours you can claim your farts are therapeutic — and wooziness from the anesthesia. Your butt is surprisingly unsore.
If they find polyps, they'll biopsy them on the spot and make you wait at home for 7-10 days to find out if you have colon cancer. You probably don't. The biopsies can cause a little bleeding, apparently. (I was polyp free.)
The difficult part of the procedure is the prep. They gave me an early morning appointment because I'm diabetic. So, I stopped eating on Monday night. Through Tuesday, I could only have clear liquids, jello, etc. (Because of the diabetes, I didn't eat anything with sugar. Non-diabetics can have sugary liquids.) Tuesday afternoon, I started drinking a gallon of electrolytes flavored with CountryTime Lemonade. It tastes like lemony sweat. You drink a glass every ten minutes for about four hours. Not a lot of fun. But it does flush you clean. By the end, you're pooping lemonade.
By midnight of the night before, you stop drinking even water. So, by the time you show up for the procedure, you haven't eaten in 36 hours.
The prep in the hospital is much like what happens before you go in for surgery: You sign a form allowing doctors to do whatever they want to you, including use you for BB gun practice. You get an IV inserted, chat with the exceptionally pleasant staff at Harvard Pilgrim in Kenmore, Boston, and make the same really bad poop 'n' tush jokes that everyone before you has made. (They ought to just print them up and save us the trouble.) The whole process really isn't that bad. In fact, the anesthetic is sort of fun.
So, if your doctor recommends a colonoscopy, and if your health plan pays for one, do it. Except for the fasting, it's not a big deal. And it sure beats colon cancer.
(By the way, the background of that shot is just a random colon snapshot I found on the Web.) [Tags: colonoscopy healthy net_neutrality too_much_information] (On march 11, I did a little cleanup of this post which I'd written while groggy from anesthetics.)
Posted by self at 05:07 PM
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Nicholas Carr at RoughType sorts through the Dyson/Cerf exchange on how much economy is in the attention economy. [Tags: attention nicholars_carr esther_dyson vint_cerf]
Posted by self at 09:46 AM
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Bill K is starting a discussion of connected health care, prompted by a presentation hosted by the MIT Enterprise Foundation. [Tags: healthcare bill_koslosky]
Posted by self at 08:48 AM
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NOTE: Someone has taken the offer. I've sold the bag.
My backpack wore out, so I got myself a Crumpler bag I'd been admiring. It's quite admirable, but you wear it over your shoulder, and I carry too much stuff, plus I have a bad back ("Bad back! Bad!"). It aggravated my back. So, I'm selling the bag.
It's a Crumpler Part and Parcel bag. Crumpler's site is so hip that it's unusable. (That site seems to be down at the moment. Try the original Australian site. Hmm, I'm not getting to that one either. Here's the description at the Palm store.) Plus, Crumpler keeps changing the names of its bags, so it's hard to figure out which is what when. The Part and Parcel is at the higher end of their offerings. It's well padded and this particular one will hold a 15" computer (although apparently not all 15" computers).
I found it hard to find information about the interior of the beast, so here are some photos showing the zippage:
I had the bag for one week. So it looks like how a new bag will look one week after you bought it. Crumpler bags are very well made.
The price at most online stores is pretty consistently $145.00 (sans shipping). I bought it new at eBay for $106.43 + $9.50. Because I'd rather sell it to someone I know than to a stranger at eBay, I'll sell it for US$65.00 + $9.50 shipping to the first person who sends me an email (self (Note: If today is not May 4 or May 5, 2006, please do not send me an email about this. I am not a Crumpler dealer. This is the only bag I'm selling.) [Tags: crumpler personal_commerce ebay]
Posted by self at 11:01 AM
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Mark Gibbs recommends Foxit Reader, a free, faster replacement for Adobe Acrobat. So far it's working for me... [Tags: adobe acrobat pdf freeware mark_gibbs]
Posted by self at 06:33 PM
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Dan Bricklin blogs about a company he's been advising that's launched a system that lets people track multiple symptoms on a PDA. Dan says the symptom has been customized for "ADHD, anxiety, Asperger's syndrome, autism, cancer treatment, depression and bipolar disorder, postpartum or menopausal issues, stress, headache, and neurological conditions such as epilepsy, brain injury, and Parkinson's disease." Sounds really useful. [Tags: medicine dan_bricklin symtrend]
Posted by self at 11:25 PM
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In Everything Bad Is Good for You, Steven Johnson has a hilarious set piece that denounces books using the same logic followed by those who denounce video games. Jean Jacques Rousseau: Restless Genius, a new biography by Leo Damrosch I'm greatly enjoying, provides some grist for that mill, quoting Rousseau on the effect of his discovery of the world of fiction:
This love of imaginary objects, and this facility for occupying myself with them, ended by disgusting me with everything that surrounded me, and determined that taste for solitude that has remained with me ever since. (p. 39) Yes, reading makes one disgusted with the world and with others. So, stop reading, you kids and go play some video games!
Steven has an appreciation of Jane Jacobs, author of the clearly thought, beautifully written and deeply human Death and Life of Great American Cities. Plus he writes about baseball stats in a way that even I, who cares about neither baseball nor stats, enjoyed. [Tags: reading games rousseau steven_johnson baseball jane_jacobs cities]
Posted by self at 07:25 AM
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Google Calendar looks useful, but it doesn't sync with Palm, so it is dead to me. With a commodity product such as a calendar, the nits are determinative. (BTW, syncing is not the same as importing and exporting.) [Tags: google palm calendar]
Posted by self at 11:10 AM
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Ray Kurzweil, who has long pioneered technology for the visually disabled, has announced a highly portable device that combines a 5 megaxpixel camer and a PDA that lets you snap a picture of some text and have it read back to you. This particular piece of the singularity will be available this summer.
Very cool. [Tags: accessibility ray_kurzweil]
Posted by self at 06:10 PM
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McAfee acquired SiteAdvisor last week. I'm a big fan of SiteAdvisor (Disclosure: I'm also a stock-owning advisor), and I'm pleased that it seems like McAfee is going to keep it going in its current direction as a free service and a good citizen.(I'm an advisor because I feel this way, not vice versa.)
If you haven't downloaded the SiteAdvisor browser plugin, I recommend that you do so. I use its evaluations at least several times a day. [Tags: siteadvisor mcafee spyware malware]
Posted by self at 06:50 PM
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Paul English's son Mike, age 11, has made his first video. It's got an octopus, a sound track, Claymation and credits. What more could you want?
Posted by self at 11:29 AM
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Tim's got a post with lots of comments discussimg laptop bags. (I get some of the blame for this, having raised the topic with Tim at dinner a few nights ago.)
Not so coincidentally, but before reading Tim's post, I ordered a Crumpler bag off of eBay because my Swiss Army knapsack is coming apart and I admired someone's Crumpler a little bit ago.
Yes, the Crumpler web site is so hip that it's unusable. [Tags: bags tim_bray crumpler]
Posted by self at 09:03 PM
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Bill DeRouchey is trying to find out when and who introduced the use of two vertical bars to mean "pause."
Now there's a question I'd never thought of!
If you happen to know, could you leave a comment? Thanks. [Tags: bill+derouchey]
Posted by self at 02:01 PM
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Amazing closeups of insects. (Found at Reddit.com) [Tags: photos insects]
Posted by self at 04:54 PM
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This is one of those ineffably cool sites.
Try searching for words. For example, did you know that "squeamish" is one unit more frequently used than "hypnotist"?
The site was created by Jonathan Harris, who also did these. (Thanks to Pito for the link.) [Tags: cool words jonathan+harris]
Posted by self at 12:44 PM
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Believe me, I know that's the least enticing headline ever, but, March is colonoscopy month so I'm obliged by law to talk about my colon.
If you're 50+, you should get a colonoscopy every 5 years or so (or when your doctor tells you). They're generally covered by insurance, if you have insurance (stupid stupid country). Having skipped my annual physical for 5 years, I finally went last month, and my doctor has had me schedule a shove 'n' peek for a couple of weeks from now. Since colon cancer is often detectable in pre-cancerous form, my avoidance is just plain stupid.
Here's a piece in Salon that may motivate you. Here's an article it references that is reassuring about the process. And here's a picture of the pretty side of Katie Couric.
As the person who scheduled my colonoscopy told me, you have to take it with a grain of salt. [Tags: colonoscopy health]
Posted by self at 08:55 AM
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The last bit of snow melted from our lawn yesterday.
Today the crocuses are up, but they don't look happy about it.
I remember this. And this. Most of all, I remember this.
Don't let up your guard, Boston! The sucker punch is coming! [Tags: boston weather]
Posted by self at 08:43 AM
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After fifty years of a signature shambling walk due to the fact that my shoes always come untied, my wife has shown me that I have been tying my shoes wrong. After 30 days of empirical testing, I have concluded what I knew at the beginning: She's right. I'd been putting the loop under the other loop, or maybe over it. I'm not very topological. But whatever the right way is, it requires bending your fingers 60 degrees backwards at the tips and spinning your shoes twice in a clockwise direction (counterclockwise in Australia).
In any case, my fingers know how to do it even though my brain can't follow. Not only does the knot work, but I can still release my aching dogs with a single pull on the emergency cord, unlike our son who double-knots his laces and thus wastes precious time pulling twice. I keep telling him that he's not going to get those nanoseconds back, but will he listen to the voice of experience? No, especially not when it comes from a 55-year-old adult who's just learned how to tie his shoes.
Here's a page with some knot-tying techniques. I believe I had been a victim of an ineptly tied Two Loop Shoelace Knot.
[Tags: shoes knots shambling adult_idiocy]
Posted by self at 08:42 AM
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Daniela Waschow interviewed me when I was in Hamburg. She's posted the podcast — it's about 15 mins long — on her site, The Big Comfy Sofa. She certainly asked some questions I've never been asked before... [Tags: daniela+waschow podcast]
Posted by self at 07:53 AM
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When you check in for a flight by going to a counter staffed by a live human being, the human does a prodigious amount of typing and the whole process takes longer than if you used one of them new-fangled automated check-in kiosks.
So why don't they just put one of those kiosks behind the counter for the check-in people to use?
Posted by self at 07:09 PM
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Research fellows at Harvard are pretty removed from faculty politics, but I was nonetheless surprised that the Board voted Summers out since it meant admitting they made a mistake in hiring him.
Sure he was smart. But he was also a ham-fisted egoist with a petulant CEO's sense of collaboration.
Bad fit. Good bye.
Posted by self at 02:26 AM
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Plug in your zip code and find the local gas station with the lowest prices...
Posted by self at 04:32 AM
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ComputerWorld has a terrific interview with Pres Eckert, one of the inventors of ENIAC, in which he busts some myths. Very interesting. The interview is from 1989; Eckert died in 1995. [Tags: computers pres_eckert eniac]
Posted by self at 05:36 PM
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Remember when hackers were people who were able to circumvent the safeguards of a system to get it to do what they wanted and were sometimes played by the adolescent Angelina Jolie?
The Boston Globe today on the front page promises to show us how to "hack" our iPods and other devices. The article, by Hiawatha Bray, continues the trend of weakening the term "hack" so that it means tips 'n' tricks. For example, the article suggests two ways to "hack" Windows XP: Use the text-to-speech capability built into the system and manage the programs that automatically start up by using the built-in Windows' utility designed for the job.
Q: What will we call the hacking that subverts and circumvents (for good or for evil)? Extreme hacking? X hacking? Xacking?
A: If Congress has it's way: Terrorism. [Tags: hacking language hiawatha_bray]
Posted by self at 09:01 AM
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Having asked for your help trying to figure out what the four of us should do in NYC this past weekend, here are some highlights of what we ended up doing. Keep in mind our multiple restrictions: two shabbos-keepers, four vegetarians, one crutch-assisted walker, one whiny adult...
On Saturday we got up late and went to the Museum of Modern Art's Pixar exhibit. (We'd bought tickets ahead of time online, but there wasn't much of a line.) Somewhat disappointing. The wide-wide-wide screen movie they put together for the exhibit was mesmerizing and makes you wish Pixar gave itself permission to do a non-commercial film. The rest consisted mainly of items to please fans, although some of the items by themselves were beautiful, clever, or intricate in their design. Surprisingly little on the how-to, which was ok with me, Still, I was hoping to see more of Pixar-as-art...whatever that means.
We also spent some time on the fifth floor of the MoMA, which is hard to beat. (By the way, the MoMA is poorly designed for wheelchair access, at least in the special exhibit space.)
We went up the Empire State Building. Ten on a Sunday morning turns out to be a good time to go: No lines. The building is still very tall. (I plan on posting some photos soon to prove that point.)
The Darwin exhibit at the Museum of Natural History was good but a little disappointing, focusing more on eye candy than on telling us how he got to his idea. It covered big influences, such as the revolution in geology, Darwin's observation of artificial selection, and Malthus' writings, way too briefly. It was more about Darwin as an isolated genius.
We also went to the planetarium and saw a by-the-numbers show that starts with our night sky (spectacular) and then zooms out to the farthest edges, narrated by Tom Hanks presumably because Morgan Freeman was unavailable. It sounds better than it is: Our 15-year-old son came out of it feeling that he hadn't learned much. Me too. The ramp around the planetarium provides a walkable timeline of the universe that's pretty interesting, and the floor around it a gives helpful comparisons ... "If the planetarium were Jupiter, this bubble would be the size of Google's market cap"... that type of thing.
We had a great dinner at the Udipi Palace, one of five Indian kosher vegetarian restaurants within a block. How weird is that? The food was delicious and the waiter (owner?) was very helpful. And, for NY, pretty cheap.
We also spent a lot of time wandering around. The weather was eerily good for January, and the wandering was fantastic.
NOTES:
1. The plug converters (US to Europe) range in price from $20 to $4 in the frequent electronics rip-off stores in NY.
2. Random overheard comment made by a middle-aged man to his companions as they entered the observatory of the Empire State Building: "This building is going to be really tall by the time I get done with it." Say wha'??
[Tags: nyc the big apple gotham]
Posted by self at 11:19 AM
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We're seeing off our daughter who is going to study in Florence (yes, Italy, not Florence, NJ, although I'm sure the latter is totally lovely and rich in Renaissance art) for a semester. So the four of us, aged 15 to 55, are going to spend a couple of days in NYC, since the plane departs from JFK. We're staying near Times Square. Here's the challenge:
A couple of us are Shabbos-keeping Jews and thus can't go in motorized vehicles or pay money from Friday evening through Saturday at around 7pm. (There's a great worldwide database of kosher restaurants at Shamash.org, by the way.)
But wait, there's more: One of us is on crutches after knee surgery and another of us is having a back problem and can't walk for much more than hour without having to do some serious sitting. The back-problem person is also generally whiny, is never satisfied, and will probably spend most of the day looking for good wifi signals.
We already have tickets for the Museum of Modern Art on Saturday.
Other suggestions? [Tags: nyc]
Posted by self at 11:27 AM
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All I know about Krugle.com is that it's launching at Demo, it has something to do with "vertical search" and code, and it's had the incredibly bad judgment to hire RB to blog for it. Also, my friend Steve Larsen seems to be involved. (These are all actually very good signs.) [Tags: rageboy steve larsen krugle]
Posted by self at 09:02 AM
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I remain surprised that I can't find a program that lets me do the most basic of research tasks: Take notes. on books...you know, the paper-based web sites we used to read.
Oh, sure, there are word processors and various outliners, some of which are terrific. But note-taking has some specific requirements. So, here's my RFP for a program I'm calling Notetella for purposes of discussion. ("RFP" is short for "Easy for you to say.")
It's got a stand-alone client and a Web portion.
Client The client lets me enter the bibliographic data for a source I'm reading. The form defaults to showing me all the other notes I've created for this source...as if I were writing my notes on a piece of paper.
I can enter notes about the book, with a field for the page the note refers to and a field for my comments
I can tag each source, author and note with multiple tags. It shows me a list of tags I've used for this book or project.
The app lets me create a project (e.g., "Article on Pitchers") and associate a set of sources with that project. The tags I create while working on that project stay associated with it.
Projects can apply to a single article or a cluster of chapters.
I can slice, dice and cluster all those notes at will.
When I put a note into my article, it preps a footnote entry for me suitable for pasting into my article.
It can turn bibliographic entries into text formatted and marked up according to the style I specify.
If I use a note when writing an article in my word processor, I can easily (not sure how) let Notetella know that I've used it so I don't use the same quote twice inadvertently. (This is probably the only feature that couldn't be implemented as a straightforward database app.)
Web
Why should I have to enter all that data myself? If anyone else has created a bibliographic entry for my source, the Web piece shows it to me.
It also shows me everyone else's notes on that book.
I can search by book, author, tag, Noteteller (i.e., other participants in the system).
I can leave comments on other people notes.
Every Noteteller gets her own page at the site, as at Delicious.com.
Notetellers can declare particular books or projects to be private, although public is better
I can upload/download notes and projects from my client.
I know there are pieces of this around. There are some great outliners. There are Web-based systems such as Cluebacca and Clipmarks (which got a nice mention in the WSJ today), but they're also not aimed exactly at my particular needs...and I think my needs in this case are fairly common among people reading books for research.
Sure wish I were a software developer. A really good one. With lots of free time. And an Hawaiian beach house. (Why not?)
Posted by self at 09:03 AM
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Jeez, a lot of popular TV shows are about super-competent teams: the 107 different flavors of CSI, House, The West Wing... In each of those shows, everyone knows everything. Oh, they may be puzzled for an hour minus the commercials, but the puzzles are just an opportunity to flex their competency.
Is this a response to the world's new (or newly-exposed) complexity? When the enemy is an identifiable superpower, bravery and strength saves us. When the threat is that our environment is fragmenting and the pieces are raining down on us, the ability to put the pieces together saves us.
When we are facing an enemy with massive power, it's good to believe that a single individual can make the difference, especially if he's played by Sylvester Stallone. When the enemy is the pulling apart of everything we know, it's good to believe that we can form teams that cannot be pulled apart. [Tags: entertainment]
24 is an interesting hybrid: Competent team, heroic individual.
Posted by self at 10:12 AM
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Chris Locke writes about "Indigo Children," a meme reported on by the New York Times. The Indigo idea sounds like it pushes a whole bunch of buttons all at once — New Age, angels, the paranormal, child-worship, ADD. If it had some anti-child-porn hysteria about it, it'd be perfect. As one of the people in the NYT article says, this is basically the same social world view as Harry Potter's muggles v. wizards set up.
Anyway, it is a great example of what Chris has been talking about over at Mystic Bourgeoisie, America's Toughest to Spell weblog. [Tags: chrisLocke rageboy indigoChildren]
Posted by self at 07:58 AM
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Susan Mernit has moved to Yahoo Personal, which is excellent news for Yahoo. And since she's now blogging about the personals space, it's good news for all of us, too.
And Louis Rosenfeld, doyen of Information Architecture (damn! I just looked up doyen and it means "senior member," which Lou chronologically is not, but I've always wanted to use the word so I'm going to even though it's wrong — yeah I'm a little cranky this morning) has launched Rosenfeld Media, "a publishing house dedicated to developing short, practical, and useful books on user experience design." Lou is, unsurprisingly, embracing the conversational properties of the Internet and trying to break through the Cardboard Wall. (I just made up Cardboard Wall. It means that which separates authors from readers. On the other hand, I was wrong about what "doyen" means, too.) (Disclosure: I am on Rosenfeld Media's board of advisors. I accepted because I like what Lou is doing.) [Tags: susanMernit yahoo personals louisRosenfeld rosenfeldMedia ux doyen]
Posted by self at 07:50 AM
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The Boston Globe obituary of Stanely Tupper of Maine recounts his years in Congress as one of the most principled of liberal Republicans, his vote for the Voting Rghts Act and the Medicare Act, his refusal to support Barry Goldwater or the first Bush president, his law practice, his co-authorship of a book on US-Canada relations, his years as a lawyer and his continued involvement in politics. I hadn't known of him before reading the obituary, but I came away impressed.
But what struck me most is this quote from his wife towards the end of the article:
But the most fun he ever had on the job, Mr. Tupper told his wife, was when he was a border patrolman in Texas and Maine. ''He was 21, they gave him a Stetson, a horse, and a badge, and no other job ever quite measured up to that," his widow said. A Stetson, a horse, and a badge: An American peak experience.
[Tags: america stanleyTupper obituaries]
Posted by self at 12:53 PM
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Ethan has a photo essay on how to build a ger, a Mongolian tent-like thingie.
Very interesting, and it makes me appreciate the indoors ever more so. [Tags: EthanZuckerman dyi mongolia]
Posted by self at 01:03 AM
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I've been hesitant to say this out loud because it's just too baseless and empty, but what the hell:
2006 will be The Year of Truth.
At least 2006 will be a good year for truth.
I don't know why I think so. But I do. And I've never been right yet.
Posted by self at 03:16 PM
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Why the media can't get Wikipedia right:
In the wake of the Seigenthaler Affair, Wikipedia made some changes. Why did the media get the story so wrong? When the mainstream media addressed the John Seigenthaler Sr. affair — he's the respected journalist who wrote an op-ed in USAToday complaining that slanderously wrong information about him was in Wikipedia for four months — the subtext couldn't be clearer: The media were implicitly contrasting Wikipedia's credibility to their own. Ironically, the media got the story fundamentally wrong. Most media reports presented the narrative line of the story roughly as follows: A person of indisputable honor was smeared in Wikipedia. Faced with incontrovertible evidence of its failings, the mainstream media shamed Wikipedia into reluctantly becoming more like them. See, Wikipedia was unreliable all along, just like we said! We're the grownups, and now we're making Wikipedia grow up... Are leaves mulch?:
Peter Morville's criticism of folksonomies, et al. I'm very fond of Peter Morville's Ambient Findability, a highly readable exploration of what's going on in the field of information architecture, i.e., how we find stuff, written by a practitioner and thought-leader. Larry Irons wrote to me recently, however, asking about Peter's jibe about the idea that I've been pushing, that we're moving from trees of knowledge to big piles of leaves... Cool Tool :
Power scanning!
Posted by self at 09:00 AM
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Why do I find Chris Locke's new business card so cool?
September 09, 2006
My kid's book on Amazon
September 05, 2006
Craig Cline, RIP
August 29, 2006
The Feng Shui of Crowds
August 28, 2006
StopBadWare lists AOL 9.0
August 23, 2006
Fear of export
August 21, 2006
Social network sites research
August 15, 2006
My kids' novel
August 14, 2006
Million Dollar Idea #583 - the OOMPH
August 06, 2006
Richard Feynman explains it all
August 02, 2006
What I'd do with Mel
August 01, 2006
The self-pity index
July 31, 2006
Twenty seconds with Murray Bookchin
July 27, 2006
Getting an ISBN through Lulu - second try
Go through the normal publishing process. You'll upload your content and your cover, specify sizes, specify a price, and be given an opportunity to buy a sample copy for yourself. At the end of it all, go back to your Publish tab. Click on the Global Distribution package link to the right of your book listing.
Go through the steps to pay them $99 Go back to your Publish tab. Note that you now have an ISBN.
Click on the "Accept or Deny" link Click on the "Reassign ISBN" link
On the next page, click on the "Assign ISBN to New Edition" button It will create a new edition for you and start up the Publish wizard again.
Do not continue. Close out of Lulu. Come back when you have your new cover with the ISBN printed on it.
When you have the new cover and content, go back to your Publish tab and click on your project title, which will start up the Publish wizard again.
July 26, 2006
The morality of entropy, and next summer's blockbuster
July 25, 2006
New issue of Joho
I just published a new issue of my increasingly intermittent newsletter, JOHO:
Cool Tool: Diigo notes socially.
What I'm playing:
Gun is disappointing. Indigo Prophecy progresses from cool to idiotic.
Bogus contest: Metadata for traditional authoritiesJuly 24, 2006
New stuff from Socialtext and Technorati
Do new cars still have break-in periods?
July 23, 2006
AJAXy timeline
July 14, 2006
Audio Berkman's new home
July 11, 2006
Mumbai
Jon Udell is pushing a mower
July 10, 2006
Won't switch windows
July 08, 2006
Getting an ISBN from Lulu
2. After reviewing the press-ready PDFs for the interior and exterior to your satisfaction, go to the PUBLISH tab and click on the Global Distribution link next to your title.
3. Complete check out. Your book should now have an ISBN number assigned to it when you look at it in the project list.
4. Edit your interior document to add the ISBN to the copyright page.
5. Edit your cover art to add an ISBN box.
6. Step back through the publish process for your book (I think you might have to hit the "DENY" button on the first page to put it in a status where you can edit it) and upload the new interior document and the new cover art with ISBN numbers
7. Carefully review the press-ready PDF and Cover art files to your satisfaction.
8. When ready, order a proof copy.
9. Even MORE carefully review proof. If happy, click APPROVE and wait 6-8 weeks for it to get to all the booksellers' databases. Future changes will cost you a $79 revision fee.
June 18, 2006
Lit on maps
June 05, 2006
Las Vegas meta-luck
June 03, 2006
CraigsList and GoogleMaps mashed together
May 29, 2006
Unlocking the secret of invisibility
May 25, 2006
New issue of WordWays
May 11, 2006
Camp Jabberwocky sunders
May 10, 2006
Colonoscopy - More than you want to know...or see
Violating the principle of Gut Neutrality,
a Disney bit elbows aside amateur bits.May 08, 2006
Attention shoppers!
May 05, 2006
Koslosky on connected healthcare
May 04, 2006
Crumpler bag (no longer) for sale
evident.com). This offer is only good for shipping to addresses in the US. And it's only good until tomorrow. After that, it goes up on eBay.
May 02, 2006
Replacement Acrobat
April 30, 2006
PDA symptoms
Everything Good Is Bad for Rousseau
April 15, 2006
Syncing Google Calendar
April 14, 2006
Kurzweil's handheld reader
April 11, 2006
McAfee acquires SiteAdvisor
April 08, 2006
First Claymation from Mike
March 30, 2006
Bags o' Tim
March 29, 2006
Odd question of the day
March 28, 2006
Bug photos
March 22, 2006
Graphic display of quantitative information 2.0
March 13, 2006
My colon
Winter's Rope-a-dope
March 11, 2006
How to tie your shoelaces
March 07, 2006
Podcast interview
March 04, 2006
An airline mystery
February 23, 2006
Ding Dong, Summers is gone!
February 18, 2006
Lowest local gas prices
February 14, 2006
From analog to digital computers
February 13, 2006
Hacking hacking
January 30, 2006
Weekend in NYC
January 27, 2006
The NYC Shabbos-keeping, crutch-walking challenge!
RageBoy fan notes
January 20, 2006
Request for Program: Notetella
January 16, 2006
Heroic competency
January 14, 2006
Indigo RageBoy
January 13, 2006
Rosenfeld and Mernit's new ventures
January 09, 2006
An American
January 04, 2006
Brrr? Ger
January 03, 2006
2006 and truth
January 02, 2006
New issue of JOHO
I just published a new issue of my free newsletter, JOHO.
What I'm playing: Murderous rivolity rules.Rageboy's Web2.0 business card
Possibly because I am a dork? [Tags: web20 googlemaps christopherLocke RageBoy businessCards]
Posted by self at 08:57 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
December 22, 2005
The transformation of So
Tim Berners-Lee has started a blog. Yay!
And what's the first word in it? "So." As in "So I have a blog."
Remember when "so" indicated a logical connection between two thoughts? "I complained about the soup, so the chef spit into it?" Over the past ten years, beginning in (I think) Silicon Valley "so" flipped to become a way of easing listeners into an entirely new topic. Or into a welcome new blog.
So what? So, that's what. (Thanks to Mark S Petrovic for the link and pointing out the "so.") [Tags: TimBernersLee tbl blogs]
Posted by self at 12:17 PM | Comments (10) | TrackBack
December 18, 2005
Great Doonesbury today
At least I really enjoyed doonesbury]
Posted by self at 02:03 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
December 14, 2005
Allienated dining, etc.
I ate at restaurant in Watertown yesterday. I had trouble enjoying the food because the place is so in love with itself, starting with its menu descriptions, that it was like watching a Chevy Chase movie.
Here's a scene from The Matrix done as ascii animation. [Tags: marketing ascii matrix]
Posted by self at 09:57 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
December 02, 2005
My startling insights into Helsinki
It turns out that I only had about 1.5 hours to wander around Helsinki this morning. Yet in that time I'm confident that I have absorbed the essence of this city, including its arts, culture, history, and people. And now I am ready to render judgment:
What a pretty city! I hope I can come back some time.
Stay tuned for future pronouncements.
I'm blogging from the Helsinki airport where I've learned that an "American" pizza has ham, pineapple and blue cheese on it. Perhaps the "Stoned American" pizza does, but that's not a combo I've come across in the States. They've kindly made me one with just cheese. My limited experience of Finnish foods leads me to conclude - nay, to pronounce - that it is not the most vegetarian-friendly cuisine in the world. On the other hand, last night I had a cup of glogg (sp?), a mulled wine favorite of the season that was much better than I'd expected. I would have drank it anyway because it's called glogg (sp?).
Posted by self at 06:05 AM | Comments (5) | TrackBack
November 30, 2005
The room was so small that...
The Quality Crown Hotel Paddington is a perfectly good budget hotel in London - modern, clean, friendly, a block from Paddington station, 80 pounds a night - but I'm a little puzzled. When I got here yesterday afternoon, the person at reception told me that he was upgrading me for free to a larger room. I don't understand how the room could be any smaller unless the bed were half in the shower or if I were required to share it with the harpoonist from the Pequod.
(Ok, it's a small room. But I'd stay here again.)
I had a jetlag dream that seemed so important and was so vivid that I couldn't go back to sleep until I wrote down the key points. In it, I was mistakenly admitted to a group meeting with an unnamed Supreme Court justice. When called upon, I explained that there are three key points: 1. We as a culture are becoming comfortable with huge amounts of information and details. 2. We are astoundingly good at evaluating the metadata around that information, deciding how seriously to take it. 3. The value of this is an increasing tolerance of - nay, demand for - complexity.
So, there's your answer. Now, what was the question?
Posted by self at 02:35 AM | Comments (5) | TrackBack
November 17, 2005
Hacking kayak
At buzz.kayak.com, you can see the most popular locations other people from your area are searching for on Kayak, the travel deal aggregator. Now there's a hack that will let you see the most popular searches to locations with a particular activity. For example,
http://buzz.kayak.com/h/buzz/flights?code=BOS&rc=&ac=ski
shows where Boston Kayak users (well, actually people looking for flights from Boston) are looking for skiing.
http://buzz.kayak.com/h/buzz/flights?code=BOS&rc=&ac=nude
shows the nude beaches Bostoners are looking for because we're so damn proud of our maple-syrupy bodies. [Tags: travel]
Posted by self at 04:19 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
Preparing for my Mac
My PowerBook is presumably on its way. My expectation is that the robustness of its hardware will be on a par with my Thinkpad X40 (well, not this particular X40 since it seems to be a lemon) but that its software will be far more robust and require less maintenance. I've used Macs on and off for many years, and am the reluctant sys admin for my father-in-laws Mac OS X desktop, so I expect the learning curve to be steep and that I will find it somewhat less elegant and wonderful than y'all think I should.
I'm looking for suggestions for what I need to equip my machine with. I am not looking to spend a lot of money. Also, keep in mind that my big Windows desktop machine is my primary work computer. I'll be using the Mac for when I travel.
| I need: Powerpoint. I make a good proportion of my living giving speeches and I use just about all of Powerpoint's animation capabilities. Open Office doesn't quite match it yet. And seamless integration with Powerpoint on my desktop would make life simpler. Hence, I think the answer is: Powerpoint. Word-compatible word processor. Since the only way to get Powerpoint is to get it with Word (I believe), I'll probably be using Word. Graphics program. Vector and raster editing. I use Paintshop Pro 9 on the PC. I'm not a power user, but I do need to edit images, use some special effects, etc. HTML editor. I use DreamWeaver on the PC. It's got lots more than I need, although I like that. Email client. I expect I'll either use the one that comes with it or Thunderbird. Browser. I'm very fond of Firefox on the PC. I would like: Programming environment. Don't throw dead cats at me, but I'm an amateur Visual Basic programmer. I enjoy it. I was a marginally ok amateur C programmer, and once wrote a book on Lisp for beginners (very very beginners), but I crapped out at C++ and Java. Too abstract for me. I like languages that make it easy to create forms/UIs. Any suggestions? Maybe I'll try Squeak again. Emulator software? Too much of my work environment is stuff I've written in VB. E.g., my blog editing software. Any recommendations about emulators that might possibly run that stuff? Fun: Games. Something to play on an airplane. Free would be good. Music editor. Anything minimal around that will let me paint notes on staves and play back the cacophony? Hardware: What do you recommend as essential add-ons? Utilities and misc.: IRC. I've been using Hydra. Chatzilla is ok, though. Skype. The one and only. IM. I use AOL's. Do I like it? Not particularly. Text editor. I primarily use TextPad. I'd be ok with any other non-wimpy text editor. Heck, I'd even consider returning to emacs. I hear it's still In. What do I not know enough to know I need? Sites.: What are the essential sites? For downloading software? For advice? For making fun of those poor, loser m$sft Windoze users? |
Jeez, this list is getting expensive. I just remembered another reason I've resisted geting a Mac.
Thanks for whatever advice you can give me. [Later: I added some stuff after reading Bryan Strawser's list of essentials. [Tags: mac macintosh apple]
Posted by self at 09:14 AM | Comments (73) | TrackBack
October 23, 2005
Alien electrical outlets
Our electrician, Walter Nowicki (yeah yeah, he should get a wiki, haha) replaced an old plug and thought I might want to blog about it. He's right.
The house is about 100 years old. Walter guesses the plug might be 60 years old...
[Tags: trivia]
Posted by self at 06:13 PM | Comments (8) | TrackBack
October 11, 2005
Major shoelace efficiency breakthrough
Ian promises to teach his readers how to tie a shoelace in a third the time. (The flipbook version is particularly helpful.)
Posted by self at 11:25 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
October 10, 2005
My life as a spatially-challenged American
My life as a spatially challenged AmericanIt's my brother-in-law's birthday today (Happy birthday, Joe!), so I was deputized to print out a card for him. I do this for many of our relatives' birthdays since I'm the one in the family who uses PowerPoint. So, I wrote up a simple card with printing on the front, a fold, and then printing on the inside. You know, a card.
Q: How many tries did it take me to get this printed right, with the right stuff on the cover and the right stuff on the inside?
A: Eight. And by "right" I mean that it opens backwards, like a Hebrew book. I gave up.
Amusing fact: By the time I got to the eighth and "right" version, I had flipped the text for both pages upside down. [Tags: PowerPoint idiocy]
Posted by self at 11:37 AM | Comments (8) | TrackBack
September 27, 2005
Arthroscopic knee surgery
Our 14-year-old son has come through his arthroscopic knee surgery well. The surgeon was very pleased. (She's also amazingly kind.) Our son's problem was bilateral osteochondral media femoral condyles, or at least that's what I copied out of his case file. Possible that was the solution, not the problem. Possibly it's the new type of martini sweeping the medical bars. In any case, they drilled holes in his bone to stimulate the flow of blood in order to take care of the bilateral osteochondral lesions (or, in lay terms, "chilled with a twist of lemon").
He'll be on crutches for six weeks, and then six weeks after that he goes in to have the other knee done. If it works, he'll be able to dance again in 6 months; the doctors had forced him to stop doing almost all athletics — he was taking 5 dance classes a week — for the past year.
By the way, if you click on the photo, you'll see a more detailed view. See if you can spot what his problem was!
Posted by self at 03:06 PM | Comments (7) | TrackBack
September 25, 2005
Begin The Beguine The Screen
Susan Crawford has put together one of the most delightful five minutes I've spent on line in a while. [Later: The brilliant Flash work was done by Nicholas Kaye at MentalDefective.com.] [Tags: SusanCrawford multimedia]
Posted by self at 10:18 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
September 21, 2005
Design your own postage stamps, Finnish style!
In Finland, you can design your own postage stamps. Just don't tell the Boobs4BourbonSt guy. In fact, don't tell me.(Thanks to Juha Jokinen for the link.)
Posted by self at 03:07 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack
September 20, 2005
Real piracy isn't so pretty
EthanZ reports on the not-so-amusing piracy that steals 850 tons of rice intended for tsunami victims. Talk like a pirate? Sure. Steal food like a pirate? Not so funny. [Tags: TalkLikeAPirate EthanZuckerman tsunami]
Posted by self at 03:13 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack
September 13, 2005
Are Podcasts the death of potato chips?
The Berkman Center has a new rule for lunchtime sessions that are being podcast: No potato chips will be served.
Apparently, last year the sounds of bags opening and chips crunching drowned out the conversation.
What's next? No slurpy soda drinking? No rustling from corduroy-shod thighs?
Posted by self at 01:10 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
September 07, 2005
A suggestion
Let's repeal the Law of Unintended Consequences to see what happens.
Posted by self at 04:34 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack
September 03, 2005
Satellite photo of New Orleans
This post-flood satellite image has one-meter resolution. (Note: It's a BIG graphic.) [Found at www.Reddit.com] [Technorati tags: katrina]
Posted by self at 07:14 AM | Comments (5) | TrackBack
September 02, 2005
The poorest
Brendan Greeley is in Lake Provdence, once of the poorest regions in America. Relief efforts are not reaching there. So he's set up a PayPal account for donations. From his blog:
Since Sunday, hundreds of evacuees from New Orleans have arrived in Lake Providence and the surrounding area. They can't get to Red Cross shelters in Monroe, the nearest city; they are out of gas and money and energy. Providence Church has emerged as a shelter, not because the town planned for it, but because evacuees stopped at the church and stayed.
The most immediate priority is food, water and toiletries, and then to help get some of these evacuees to Red Cross shelters in Monroe, the nearest city or family that can take them in. Some of them will end up staying, though, and will need help getting settled and getting their children into local schools.
I trust Brendan 100%. And I love him the more for doing this. [Technorati tags: katrina]
Posted by self at 04:27 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
The Flood, in Austria
The flood continues to be front-page news here in Austria. The stories focus on the suffering, the looting, and the political impact.
The scale of the disaster is horrifying. It's not that I thought the US was safe in a "Bush to Nature: Bring it On!" sort of way. But I would have thought that we could ameliorate the effects far faster. This is horrifying, scary, humbling, sad beyond words.
My hotel room looks out over the Danube, a river peaceably within its banks, making it even harder to imagine the suffering of my fellow citizens. The Red Cross donation button works even here, but I am still too many removes from the reality of Katrina. My heart and hopes go to the victims and those working on their behalf.
Posted by self at 03:22 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
August 29, 2005
3D alphabet
Yes, it's a 3D alphabet. Or, perhaps it's what our alphabet would look like if we lived in a 4D world.
It's also available as a font. (Thanks to Mark Dionne for the link.) [Technorati tags: fonts alphabet]
Posted by self at 08:40 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
August 26, 2005
Lazy, dumb programmers that are nothing of the sort
Philipp Lenssen explains why programmers should be lazy and dumb, although of course he doesn't mean either of those terms in the way we usually do.
Posted by self at 02:53 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack
August 23, 2005
Microsoft Word's Work Menu
I learned in Guy Hart-Davis' excellent Word Annoyances (O'Reilly) that Word has a "work menu" that lists the files you designate so you can easily load ones that you use frequently. To install it, go to Tools > Customize > Built-in Menus and drag "Work Menu" onto your tool bar. Nice!
But I couldn't figure out how to remove an entry from the list. PCPlus has an answer, and, although it's ridiculously complex, it's the best one I could find. If you know of an easier way to delete an entry from the Work Menu, let me know. Anyway, PCPlus says to go to Tools > Customize > All Commands and drag ‘"ToolsCustomizeRemoveMenuShortcut" to your toolbar. (Right-click on it and rename it before you close the Customize dialogue box.) Now when you click on it and then click on the Work menu, it lets you click on an entry you want to remove.
Omigod, didn't anyone at Microsoft use the Work menu before it shipped?
By the way, if the PCPlus technique doesn't work, this page has a macro that supposedly will do the trick. I haven't tried it, so take it as is:
Public Sub DeleteWorkMenuItems()
Dim i As Long
Dim nDelete As Long
With WorkMenuItems
For i = .Count To 1 Step -1
nDelete = MsgBox( _
Prompt:="Delete """ & .Item(i).Name & """?", _
Buttons:=vbYesNoCancel, _
Title:="Delete Item from menu")
If nDelete = vbCancel Then Exit For
If nDelete = vbYes Then .Item(i).Delete
Next i
End With
End Sub
It also has a macro you can attach as an item on your work menu. (If you're not comfortable with Word macros, skip it! I am not responsible, etc.) [Tags: annoyances WordAnnoyances word Microsoft tips]
Posted by self at 05:54 PM | Comments (7) | TrackBack
August 21, 2005
Si goes to Marlboro
AKMA and Margaret's Si, if I may so term him, is on his way to Marlboro College, a wonderful school that grows genuine community out of an Athenian democracy (except the women get to vote, too). Good luck, Si! [Technorati tags: akma]
Posted by self at 11:21 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
How to tell you're a city boy
I woke up this morning in my tent in the orchard to the sound of a rooster, and I thought, "Goddamn it! Doesn't he know it's a weekend?"
Posted by self at 11:04 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
August 17, 2005
Credit card scam
I just heard about a telephone scam I would have fallen for, so I thought I'd pass it along.
In essence, the caller says they're with the credit card company's security department. They read you your card number and tell you some malarkey about refunding you money. They ask for the security code on the back of your card to confirm that you're in possession of the card.
As soon as they ask you for that code, you know they're scammers. That's all they want from you. Give it to them and you'll find a hefty charge added to your account. Apparently the credit card companies never ask you for that security code.
Of course, the warning I received and am passing on to you might itself be a scam. In fact, maybe I'm hoaxing you right now. Bwahahaha...eh.
Posted by self at 04:33 PM | Comments (10) | TrackBack
Jeneane and AKMA on hostile hostelery
AKMA chimes in on Jeneane's recent unpleasantness with Holiday Inn. Still arguably better - for what it's worth - than this, the top result if you google "horrible hotel photos." Then there's this person who is so pissed at the Hotel de l'Orchidee in Paris that s/he set up a page just so it would rise high in "Orchidee" search results. Didn't work. It's #2 :)
Posted by self at 01:13 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
August 13, 2005
No discounts for Jews in Massachusetts
Last year, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts set aside one summer Saturday as No Tax Day: Whatever you buy for under $2,500 was free of the 5% sales tax.
Some Jews complained because the orthodox can't touch money on the sabbath.
So, the Commonwealth responded admirably by declaring an entire tax free weekend, today and tomorrow.
Unfortunately, the Commonwealth didn't consult its religious calendar: Sunday is Tisha B'Av, a fast day remembering the destruction of the Temples. Guess what orthodox Jews can't do on Tisha B'Av? Yes, they can't eat, bathe, wear leather, have sex...or touch money. You spend the day in shul studying Torah, so until the mall opens up a Study, Daven 'n' Beyond store, there's not going to be a lot of temptation to shop anyway.
Nice try, Commonwealth! [Tags: massachusetts judaism]
Posted by self at 11:03 AM | Comments (6) | TrackBack
August 09, 2005
Giving airtime to the people who are angry at what you've said
Shifting Baselines ran an ad warning that we're depleting marine life. It was a humorous little clip, but it got some sport and commercial fisherpeople quite angry. So, SB went out and talked with a bunch of them, and put together a five minute video in which they get to speak.
This is so cool. (Thanks to Jason Lefkowitz of Oceana for the link.) (There are more videos on the Shifting Baselines home page, including this one on grassroots organizing and this very odd one about penguins.) [Tags: ShiftingBaselines environment]
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August 08, 2005
Blank of blank WWII games
WWII-based PC video games:
Company of Heroes
Brothers in Arms
Medal of Honor
Hearts of Iron
Call of Duty
See any pattern in the titles? Nah, me neither.
Posted by self at 01:25 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack
August 03, 2005
Oliver Brown, Wikipedian, singer-songwriter...
Yesterday I got to catch up a bit with Oliver Brown, Wikipedian and singer, a family friend all of his life and almost all of mine. (I've got a few years on him.)
Oliver Brown
Among Oliver's many many contributions to Wikipedia: He started the "Father/Mother of..." page. About becoming an "admin" he writes:
I became an admin 16:15 May 12, 2003 (UTC); at that point I had 3,944 edits and 75 days experience. Before being an admin, I averaged 55 edits a day. After becoming an admin, that average dropped to 28 a day. Fabiform says the decline is because of IRC. I became a Bureaucrat February 28, 2004.
His songs have become family favorites.
Great to see him... [Technorati tags: OliverBrown wikipedia ukelele]
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July 29, 2005
Hummingbirds
[Technorati tags: hummingbird]
Posted by self at 11:22 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
July 24, 2005
Holy mother of china, that is one ugly dog!
No kidding. Before you click on this link to Doc's site, you should be prepared. It is back-from-the-dead, scare-the-blind, directed-by-Tim-Burton, beyond-Photoshop ugly. [Technorati tags: ugliest DocSearls]
Posted by self at 06:11 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
July 21, 2005
World Bank looking for muniwifi experts
The World Bank's Information for Development program has a call for bids:
The consulting firm (hereby referred to as ‘consultants') is expected to have expertise in development of management strategies, deployment of technology, and process services (including management consulting, design and project management) of municipal broadband networks, in developed and/or developing countries. Additionally, consultants with a proven record in the following areas will be considered: in-depth knowledge on public policy issues related to state/local/municipal governance; reputation and expertise in the above field amounting to 5 to 10 years of experience; high research capacity and ability to develop the Study and Toolkit.
You'd have 19 weeks to complete the task, at the end of which you'll receive US$90,000 and one of Bono's black t-shirts. (If you win, I of course get a 10% finders fee.) For more information, visit this pdf. [Technorati tags: wifi muniwif]
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Boston: Where same sex marriage and jaywalking are legal?
As far as I can tell, our daughter Leah is right: There are no laws against jaywalking where we live.
I tried searching Massachusetts LawLib and couldn't find any references to laws regulating pedestrians crossing streets, so I used the site's "Ask a librarian" service, and within 12 hours got a terrific response that said,
Mass. General Laws chapter 90 section 18A, http://www.mass.gov/legis/laws/mgl/90-18a.htm, gives cities and towns the right to regulation pedestrians. Some have chosen to do so.
She then cites Pittsfield and Fitchburg city ordinances. How about Boston and Brookline?
Brookline has bylaws prohibiting the riding of horses on sidewalks, and pages of laws specifying where newsracks can be placed, but I couldn't find any that prevent pedestrians from pogo-sticking across the street in the middle of a block. Likewise, I couldn't find any laws that use the word "pedestrian" in Boston's city code except for a couple that regulate cars, not pedestrians. (Here's a list of bylaws for Massachusetts cities.)
Now, IANAL (it stands for "I am not a lawyer," not "I anal"). In fact, I don't even know where you'd look for jaywalking laws. Maybe they're legal guidelines, regulations, Papal bulls or ukases. Nevertheless, it looks to me that where we live there's nothing to stop you from stepping out into the middle of Comm Ave during rush hour as a 70 ton trailer is headed towards you.
In fact, that's pretty much how we nominate presidential candidates in this state. [Technorati tags: law jaywalking massachusetts boston brookline]
Posted by self at 10:04 AM | Comments (6) | TrackBack
July 19, 2005
Jabberwocky rocks the house
On the way back from the play, our daughter Leah pointed out that an accurate description of Camp Jabberwocky — something like "It's a summer camp where counselors come and care for severely disabled folks" — doesn't convey any idea what it's like. First, the disabilities range from people with full cognitive powers but bodies twisted like rubber bands to those with upright bodies but narrowed bands of thought. Second, the counselors, all unpaid, don't "care" for the campers. They are friends who delight in them. And as for the story of the camp itself, for fifty years it's run on ridiculous hopes and reliable miracles. Its story is beyond belief. Couldn't happen.
This year's play was F00tl00se. (I'm misspelling it because I don't know if they paid for the rights, although the version was loose enough that I'm not sure it would count even as a derivative work. For example, I'm pretty sure that there were no penguins in the original.) I could be accurate about the show, but that wouldn't tell you the truth. Jabberwocky gets your good intentions out of the way so you can see, and seeing means being overwhelmed, so here's just one moment, when a man with cerebral palsey held the stage:
Two counselors lift Larry,
his body like a burnt matchstick,
out of his wheel chair
and lay him on the stage
so he can spin himself
horizontal to gravity.
Who knew he was such a show-off?
The girls discuss the hot new boy
After the play, the actors are feeling pretty good
(Here are some photos of the Camp's float in the Fourth of July parade.)
Every time I write about Jabberwocky, I hear from people who want to get their children in. I'm sorry I can't help you because there's only room for 35 campers per month and the list of people trying to get in is much much longer than that. There isn't even a known admissions process. There's a working phone number during the summer, but I don't know what good it will do you to call it. There's no web site. There's no email. This place just doesn't operate by normal rules. I'm truly sorry I can't help you. [Technorati tags: CampeJabberwocky Jabberwocky] poetry]
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July 10, 2005
Copyright, fairness, security, and other small matters
Excellent interview with Negativland on copyright. (Thanks to Larry for the link.)
Chris Nolan reminds us that BlogHer isn't just for women. Men are welcome, too. What a great chance for men to attend what looks like a really interesting conference while simultaneously seeing what it feels like. I wish I could go but it’s smack dab in the middle of my family’s two-week vacation.
David W. Stephenson on smart mobs for homeland security. [Technorati tags: blogher security copyright DavidWStephenson]
A bit of self-centeredness, if you don't mind? E-School News has a nice write-up of my NECC keynote (video here), starting at the bottom of this page.
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July 08, 2005
Dumb shower puzzle
For many of you the only puzzle will be why I didn't realize this instantly. Anyway:
Our shower has a single lever that adjusts the hot and cold. Over the years I've noticed that my preferred temperature is at the 5 o'clock position during the winter but at 8 during the summer, i..e, I move the lever more toward cold during the summer. Since it seemed unlikely that our hot water heater was heating water hotter during the summer, I've assumed I just like a colder shower in the summer. Today I realized that that's probably not the case.
What's going on?
Posted by self at 09:02 AM | Comments (10) | TrackBack
July 05, 2005
Fourth of July with Camp Jabberwocky
I've posted at Flickr photos from the Camp Jabberwocky part of the Fourth of July parade on Martha's Vineyard.
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British business blogging conference
Our Social World in Cambridge, UK, Sept. 9 looks like it's got a a great bunch of speakers. Theme: "Why don’t British businesses blog?" (Possible sub-theme: "Why are all the speakers men?")
Posted by self at 11:37 AM | Comments (5) | TrackBack
July 01, 2005
Steve Johnson fan news...
The Washington Post has quite an amusing article about Steve. The author, Bob Thompson, went to Steve's apartment angry about the book and you can see Bob trying to dislike him. But, as all who have met Steve know, that just isn't possible.
Posted by self at 07:21 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
Lilly and Tim's NY adventure
A friend and coworker from my days at Open Text tells a story about a fine day walking through Manhattan with her boss Tim Bray, drinking some beer and maybe a bit too much single malt Scotch. And that's just the beginning. [Technorati tags: Postmodern Sass TimBray Bosses]
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June 28, 2005
Assessing conversations
A teacher who heard my talk at the NECC last night has sent me an email wondering how teachers (pre-college) can "evaluate and assess the level of student contributions to conversations." No fair disputing his premise that he has to assign grades, because we're talking about a public school system under increasing back-asswards demands for more and more "accountability" and testing. So, given that he has to give grades, if he moves more to a conversational model, how can assess students' participation? Do you know of any interesting approaches to this?
Thanks. [Technorati tag: education]
Posted by self at 12:41 PM | Comments (7) | TrackBack
June 27, 2005
Steven Johnson in the funnies
Everything Bad Is Good for You got an oblique reference in the Sunday Doonesbury. That, along with appearing on Jon Stewart's The Daily Show, has to be on Steve Johnson's life list... [Technorati tag: SteveJohnson]
Posted by self at 07:54 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
June 22, 2005
Fair, but snippy, play
From USA Today:
With boy safe, searchers celebrate
Prayers answerd in Utah mountains as lost 11-year-old is found after 4 days
Maybe I'm feeling snippy this morning, but in the interest of fairness, I expect to see a headline like the following soon:
Body of missing pretty white woman found
God turns deaf ear to distraught parents
Yeah, I guess I'm feeling snippy.
Posted by self at 11:23 AM | Comments (9) | TrackBack
June 21, 2005
Betsy's father day
Betsy Devine has a lovely reminiscence of her father and her mother. Affecting. [Technorati tags: BetsyDevine FathersDay Fathers]
Posted by self at 10:31 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
June 20, 2005
Where the raging rivers join
RageBoy writes what may be the least corporate blog post to ever appear as an official corporate blog post. Called "Lashing them together" — the "them" refers explicitly to a writer's sentences but sentences are not the only ones who receive the edge of RB's cat o' nine tales — this is a cauldron of ideas and gestures that is about child rearing the way Mt. St. Helen's was about the even distribution of ash. [Technorati tag: RageBoy]
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June 19, 2005
Your life as a comic book
Comic Life (Mac only) turns a series of photos into comic book format, complete with captions. The Flickr feed of the results is pretty cool.
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How to set an Eco-Drive watch
I got an Citizen Eco-Drive watch off eBay a few of months ago. As I blogged, the instructions for setting it are incomprehensible. So I posted my own instructions into the entry for Eco-Drive at Wikipedia . But I'm afraid an editor will take it down since I think Wikipedia doesn't like "how-to" articles. So, I'm going to post it here, just in case.
How to set a Citizen Eco-Drive watch
The English-language instructions for setting Eco-Drive watches are close to incomprehensible. Here are instructions for one particular model - BL5XXX - that probably hold for similar Eco-Drive watches. This particular model has three small dials in addition to the main face, two buttons and a stem. Its functionality includes an alarm clock, a chronograph (i.e., stop watch) and a perpetual calendar.
Here is how these instructions will refer to the various elements of the watch:
Main Face: The place where the main minute, hour and second hands are.
Dial A: The upper left small dial numbered up to 24. Underneath it says "Chronograph" and "Alarm"
Dial B: The upper right small dial numbered 0-8. Underneath it says "Perpetual calendar"
Dial C: The bottom middle small dial. It has four labels that repeat around the circle: TME (time), CHR (stop watch), L-TM (local time) and ALM (alarm)
Button A: The top button
Button B: The bottom button
Stem In: The stem in its normal position, full pressed into the watch
Stem Mid: The stem in its middle position
Stem Out: The stem pulled out all the way into this third position.
Turning the stem to the right means giving it a half turn or so in a clockwise direction. This generally turns the affected hand counter-clockwise. Likewise, turning to the left means turning the stem counter-clockwise, generally causing the affected hand to turn clockwise.
Changing modes
With the stem in, give the stem a little twist in either direction. This will cause the hand on Dial C to move, changing the mode of the clock from TME (normal time), CHR (using the stop watch), L-TM (local time) and ALM (setting the alarm). Depending on the function, changing modes may automatically change the big hands on the main face.
Setting the Perpetual Calendar
Make sure Dial C is set to TME. (See "Changing modes" above.)
Set the stem to mid. Turning it to the left will set the date. If you give it a full turn instead, the date will change continuously until you give it another little spin. (It can be difficult to get the stem spun just right to start the continuous date changing.)
The second hand points to the month. E.g., if it is pointing to 1, your watch thinks it is January. If it points at 12, your watch thinks it is December. Press B once to advance the second hand by one month.
Now you have to tell it when the next leap year is coming. Dial B indicates that. If the hand on Dial B is pointing at 0, then your watch thinks it is currently a leap year. If it points at 1, it thinks it was a leap year last year. If it points at 2, it thinks it was a leap year two years ago. And if it points at 3, it thinks it was a leap year three years ago (and that therefore next year is a leap year). Adjust this by pushing Button A once for every year you want to advance Dial B.
Push the stem all the way in. Your watch is now set to keep track of dates for the next few decades.
Setting the time
Make sure Dial C is set to TME. (See "Changing modes" above.)
Pull the stem to its out position. The second hand should advance to 12.
Turn the stem to the right or left to cause the big hands to turn. (To the right moves the hands clockwise.) The hand in Dial A will turn. Give the stem a little turn in the other direction to stop the movement. (NOTE: Dial A tells you whether the big hands are showing AM or PM; if you are setting the watch to 7:00pm (or 19:00, if you prefer), for example, the hand on Dial A should be pointing at 19. To make the hands move faster, give the stem two or three fast turns. (NOTE: This doesn't always work.)
Push the stem in all the way.
Setting the date
Make sure Dial C is set to TME. (See "Changing modes" above.)
Pull the stem to its mid position.
Turn the stem to the left to cause the date number to change. (Give the stem a little turn in the other direction to stop the movement.) The big hands will move as the date is set. (NOTE: This doesn't always work.) To make the dial move faster, give the stem two or three fast turns.
Push the stem in all the way.
Using the stopwatch
The stopwatch, or "chronograph," can measure up to an hour.
Set Dial C to CHR. (See "Changing modes" above.) The second hand will advance to 12. Button A starts and stops the stopwatch. Pressing Button A continuously resets the stopwatch to 0. Dial B records minutes.
Using local time
Set Dial C to L-TM. (See "Changing modes" above.)
Pull the stem all the way out. Turn the stem left or right once for each hour you want to advance or setback the time. When you're done, press the stem back in. So long as you are in L-TM mode, the watch will show local time. If you set the mode to TIM, it will show the time where you started.
For example, if you are visiting some place three hours ahead of your home, you would go into L-TM mode, pull the stem all the way out, and turn it stem three times to the right.
NOTE: If in setting local time you go past midnight, the calendar date will change
The alarm
(I think these instructions are correct.) To set the alarm, set Dial C to ALM. (See "Changing modes" above.) The hands move to whatever time the alarm had been set to previously.
Pull the stem out fully. Set the time you want the alarm to go off by turning the stem. Check Dial A to make sure you have it set for AM or PM. (For example, to set the alarm to go off at 11:30 PM, Dial A should point to one tick before 24. Push the stem in. The alarm is now set.
To turn off the alarm when it is beeping, press Button A.
To un-set the alarm so it won't go off at its appointed time, set Dial C to ALM and pull out the stem. Pressing Button A toggles the alarm on and off. You can tell whether it's on by looking at the second hand. If it is pointing to 41 minutes after the hour, the alarm is on. If it is pointing to 37 minutes after the hour, it is off. Why Citizen decided to make the difference a matter of four minutes beats the heck out of me.
[Technorati tags: ecodrive eco-drive howto]
Posted by self at 10:58 AM | Comments (43) | TrackBack
June 17, 2005
The Case of Theresa Schiavo
That's the title of a piece by Joan Didion in The NY Review of Books in which she insists on finding the complexities, ambiguities and unaddressed questions in the Schiavo case. Whatever your position, you'll come out of the article less sure that you were right. [Technorati tags: Schiavo JoanDidion]
Posted by self at 10:25 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
June 16, 2005
Rhythmic static
I've occasionally noticed static playing over speakers in roughly the same rhythm: a quarter note and three triplets. Deeeeet dit-dit-dit dit-dit-dit dit-dit-dit. At first I thought it was something wrong with my PC speakers or sound card. But I've also heard it over the headphones while waiting to go live at a professional radio station. And I heard it over the speakers in the back of a London cab yesterday.
Deeeeet dit-dit-dit dit-dit-dit dit-dit-dit. Deeeeet dit-dit-dit dit-dit-dit dit-dit-dit.
Is this some predictable electrical noise, like a 60-cycle hum? Or is it a coded message from our equipment?
Posted by self at 01:38 PM | Comments (11) | TrackBack
June 15, 2005
On the road
Joshua "Outlandish" Koenig and two of his friends are spending the summer driving around the US and promises to regale us with tales via email.
The first post is here. In it Joshua says the road trip's been around "for maybe ten years or so." Uh uh. National Lampoon's road trips may be that young but traveling as a type of freedom goes way back. At the very least Joshua should bring along a copy of Kerouac's On the Road.
But here's how much of a dreary parent I've become: I'm worried by the boys naming their trip's site — and ten years ago, how weird would that phrase have been? — "Vagabender," putting the "bender" front and center. Yo, Josh, drink in moderation. And don't forget to put on your galoshes. [Technorati tag: JoshKoenig]
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June 09, 2005
The real neural network
David Tebbutt points to some images of neurons that are interesting on level, beautiful at another, and awe-inspiring at yet another. [Technorati tag: neurons]
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June 06, 2005
Chanuka in Swahili
The Chanuka blog by Pampauka in Kenya explains that Chanuka in Swahili means " lighten up! get into action! Complain less and Act more."
Oddly, in Hebrew it also means "lighten up," but in the literal sense :) [Technorati tag: chanukah]
Posted by self at 02:18 PM | Comments (1)
June 05, 2005
Technology knitting memory
David Berlind, in the course of researching his genealogy, came across Yizkor (memorial) books, a type of citizen journalism in which the life and lives of European Jewish communities are recorded. More than that, he discovered how the Net can stitch together memories against the will of the strongest, most malevolent forces.
Posted by self at 04:55 PM | Comments (0)
June 03, 2005
RageBoy is not a blood-drinking lizard. Probably.
RB blogs about a very very strange guy. Holy mother of Rodan!
And, by the way, when you heard that someone had been appointed Chief Blogging Officer, did you ever ever think that this is the sort of stuff he'd be writing about? [Technorati tag: RageBoy]
Posted by self at 12:34 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
May 29, 2005
Fish out of school
The normally gregarious blue gills in the lake where my family owns a house are each standing guard over their broods.
I thought about taking some of them out of the lake for the night so they could get a good sleep, but my son nixed the idea.
Posted by self at 09:19 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
May 28, 2005
The generosity of Ms. or Mr. Linksys
We're in Western Massachusetts for the weekend. There's no cellphone signals out where we are, and also no water. So, I'm in a parking lot in the nearby small town where I'm picking up a very weak open wifi signal. SSID: linksys.
I don't know who this Linksys person is, but she seems to have residences everywhere! Thank you!
Posted by self at 09:16 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
May 26, 2005
I will be 2 billion seconds old on 3/25/14
And I expect something nice from y'all then.
This piece of superfluity comes via TimeAndDate.com. (Thanks to Marcia Blake for the link.)
Posted by self at 09:03 AM | Comments (4) | TrackBack
May 25, 2005
Acupuncture
This afternoon I went to an acupuncturist for the first time. Interesting experience.
I went because I've been having shoulder pain that extendsdown to my wrist. Of course, it's gotten considerably better since I made the appointment, but it still ranges from an ache to an intrusive shout of pain. Besides, I've never had acupuncture before.
The acupuncturist, trained in Shanghai, inserted about a dozen needles in my back, as well as attaching some suction cups (similar to what my people used to do with small cups and matches) and shining a heat lamp on me. I slept for 15 minutes. Then she had me flip over (well, she took the needles out first) and repeated the drill, so to speak. I slept again. Afterwards I was surprised to learn that the needles had been in a full inch; they felt more superficial than that.
At the moment, my shoulder is pain-free but my arm aches noticeably, pretty much the same as before the treatment. She wants me to come back twice more, a week apart. I will if only for the cat naps.
Besides, I believe the evidence that acupuncture works for some ills, even though I don't pretend to understand the theory behind it. (Someone once told me that it's not so much a theory as a mnemonic device. Don't know if there's any sense to that remark.)
A joke I hereby donate to Jay Leno:
"I went to an acupuncturist. She was very gentle. In fact, when she ran out of needles she switched to Post-It notes."
Hey, I said it was for Leno so it doesn't have to be funny!
[Technorati tag: acupuncture]
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May 22, 2005
The curse of friends
Marilyn "World's Smartest Person" vos Savant today in Parade agrees with a letter writer that it's reasonable to drop friends who curse. Writes vos Savant:
I notice that none of my friends use bad language! I guess I've never found an interesting person with a foul mouth.
Wow. Some of my best friends curse like sailors in a croc pond. And some of the best writers do also. Heck, I even know a chief blogging officer who's been known to have a mouth on him, and no one has ever ever called him not interesting. [Technorati tag: misc]
Posted by self at 01:49 PM | Comments (7) | TrackBack
April 29, 2005
Joe Mahoney's ontology
No, not ontology in the computer science. Ontology in the "logos of being" sense, whatever that means, which is exactly why my friend Joe turns to poetry.
Also, it's spring. [Technorati tag: poetry]
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April 22, 2005
Fever dreams
Because of my flu — today it's turned into merely a seal-like cough and Quasimodo's headache — I've been waking up with odd snippets of dreams in my head.
Two days ago I awoke from a dream in which the contestants on American Idol were catching fish shaped like the way they sing. So, the one who does all the Mariah Carey-esque swooping around every note reeled in an eel. Disgusting, but, then...
Yesterday I woke up with this bad joke from the early 1990s:
Why exactly I'm having Ross Perot dreams is beyond me. (And I'd clean up the awful red outlining but I'm too beat. It's not like it'd be real funny if only I'd done a better job image editing it.)
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April 13, 2005
Cool sights from above
Nicj has started aggregating cool snippets from Google Maps satellite photos. For example, here's Disneyland, Bill Gates' house, the Grand Canyon, and Mount St. Helens. The site credits the Google Sightseeing site for the idea...where, for example, you'll find a bunch of people who have spotted images with planes flying through them. [Technorati tags: maps google]
Posted by self at 08:41 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
April 07, 2005
Betsy on happy bikes
Betsy explains quite clearly why the Dutch use of bicycles make them happier than we are. It's almost enough to make me get back onto my damn bike. [Technorati tag: bicycle]
Posted by self at 05:05 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
March 29, 2005
Mac tags
Why is it that it seems many more Mac owners decorate their laptops with stickers than do PC notebook owners?
Maybe it's because we PC owners want to be able to re-sell our notebooks while Mac owners assume they're going to own their machines till they wear them down to the rims. [Technorati tag: macintosh]
Posted by self at 02:28 PM | Comments (10) | TrackBack
March 14, 2005
Shelley's proposal
Shelley's has finished her proposal for a travel book called One Ticket, Please. You can get a taste here. It's not your run of the mill travel book. No surprise: She's taken some beautiful photos.
Posted by self at 01:07 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
March 12, 2005
Meta-reflective Postmodern recreation of Las Meninas, this time titled "Four Fools with Three Cameras"
Ethan has posted about 15 seconds of an odd moment at Martin Varsavsky's party. Of Ethan, Joi, and Dan G, I seem to be the only one with the good sense to be holding a glass of wine instead of a camera.
Posted by self at 04:52 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
March 11, 2005
Why Americans shouldn't be allowed to buy, choose or drink wine
In the Madrid airport this morning (or was it last night? Hard to get my biological clock rewound), I was aimlessly browsing in the duty-free shop and decided maybe I'd buy a bottle of wine. I sampled a bigger variety of wine in the past two days than I did during my twenties, thirties and half of my forties, and all of it was just delicious. I saw a bottle that looked familiar, and figured if I've had it in Madrid, it must be good. So, for 11 euros (about $14 in real money), I bought the bottle and carried it home.
When I finally got back to our house tonight, I realized why the label was familiar. It's the very same bottle of wine I have open in our kitchen. (I go through about a bottle a month.) I had bought it blindly at Trader Joe's...where I paid $9 for it.
Posted by self at 05:59 PM | Comments (7) | TrackBack
February 19, 2005
Shiny points
Jon Stewart on blogs, thanks to onegoodmove.
A photo diary of a day in the life of Tom Peters.
[Technorati tags:DailyShow TomPeters]
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January 29, 2005
Favorite phone call so far this morning
[Ring ring]
Me: Hello.
Her: Hello!
Me: Hello!
Her: How are you this morning?
Me: I'm fine. Who is this, please?
Her: It's your mother-in-law.
Me: (Sputtering) Oh. Sorry! I didn't recognize your voice. How are you?
Her: (Laughing) That's ok...
Me: Wait, you're calling on my business line.
Her: Is this John?
Me: Nope. (laughing) Now you feel the fool!
Her: (laughing) I'm sorry!
Me: No problem. And give John my best.
Posted by self at 09:39 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
January 28, 2005
Pi: Order of magnitude quiz
Hiroyuki Goto holds the record for reciting the value of pi. How many digits did he memorize? To win, you have to come within an order of magnitude. Prize: The satisfaction of know you guessed good.
Drag-select between the X's to see the answer.
X ————In 1995, he recited over 42,000 digits. It took him 9 hours. ———— X
Posted by self at 09:10 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
January 26, 2005
Watermark art
Rageboy discovers some found art (finds some discovered art?) on a site that sells stock images cheap.
Posted by self at 08:20 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
January 23, 2005
No, I don't find the snow charming
Three hours later...
Big Bri has posted an eerie Boston snow-at-midnight photo. FreckleGirl shows what it means to dig out a car. And Trevor and his pals are just nuts :) (Thanks to Boston Online for the links.)
Posted by self at 10:08 PM | Comments (7) | TrackBack
January 07, 2005
The tortoise and the care
From Reuters (with a photo here):
NAIROBI (Reuters) - A 120-year-old giant tortoise living in a Kenyan sanctuary has become inseparable from a baby hippo rescued by game wardens, officials said on Thursday.
The year-old hippo calf christened Owen was rescued last month, suffering from dehydration after being separated from his herd in a river that drains into the Indian Ocean.
"When we released Owen into the enclosure, he lumbered to the tortoise which has a dark gray color similar to grown up hippos," Sabine Baer, rehabilitation and ecosystems manager at the park, told Reuters.
She said the hippo's chances of survival in another herd were very slim, predicting that a dominant male would have killed him.
However, Owen's relationship with the Aldabran tortoise named Mzee, Swahili for old man, may end soon. The sanctuary plans to place Owen with Cleo, a lonely female hippo.
My theory: The tortoise is desperately trying to get away...but no one can tell. [Thanks to Mark Dionne for the link.]
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January 03, 2005
Museum of Potted Meat
Here's the link. Not much more to say.
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January 02, 2005
Italics and saxophones
Steve Johnson writes about a friend who lost a Rhodes Scholarship because of his use of italics. (I may be overstating a little.) It reminds me of my friend who had applied for a faculty position and was waiting to be interviewed at the annual American Philosophical Association meeting. His application was full of his scholarly accomplisments and achievements, the articles he had published, the dissertation he had labored over to support his bold thesis about Nietzsche, and just a few lines about his personal interests. He was waiting in the hallway as the current interviewee departed, and heard a faculty committee ask, "Who's the next one?"
Answer: "The saxophone player."
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December 28, 2004
Most over-packed item in history
Here is the package of nubbins for my Thinkpad — the little red eraser-thingies — IBM sent me, shown about actual size:
Here is the package it came in: The plastic bag, in a foamy bag, packed in a basket of shock-protective cardboard in a box about a foot square.
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December 20, 2004
Pigeon view
Here's an odd idea. The Urban Eyes proposal by by Marcus Kirsch (UK) and Jussi Angesleva (Ireland) would feed pigeons tiny RFID transmitters embedded in bird seed. When a transmitting pigeon passed close enough to one of the CCTV cameras watching the streets, the camera would transmit a video image to the Urban Eyes server. You would then see how the city looked to a particular pigeon in the 12 hours between ingestion and excretion.
This won third prize in the Fused Space contest. The winning project proposed setting up light sticks on a small Swedish island; lights would be lit when people visited an online memorial for the dead. (I think.)
[Thanks to We Make Money Not Art for the info.]
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December 13, 2004
Morning in Singapore
Let's see. I left Boston on Sunday at 6, and flew from Newark, NJ at 11pm. They served dinner at 12:30 AM (rice and spinach because heaven knows we vegetarians don't like to combine elemental foodstuffs into interesting new creations) and I "slept" from 1:30-7:30AM. For some reason, they didn't serve breakfast until 1:30pm on Monday, then at 5:30pm on Monday we landed here, except that it was 6:30AM on Tuesday.
I read the Sunday edition of a Singapore paper on the plane just to see what's up. There was almost no news about Singapore, except for the reality TV shows. Are things going that well here? Could be.
After retrieving my luggage from the ultra-modern, ultra-clean airport, I stepped into a taxicab. I don't know if it was incense, breakfast, or just my cabbie, but it smelled goooood. She's from Malaysia, but married a Singaporean and is now a citizen. She likes Singapore better because it's clean and safe. When I asked her what was the one place I should see as a tourist, she recommended Sentosa, which she described as a "fantasy island." I think I'm probably not going to do that; I have so little time here that I hate to squander it on fantasy.
Because I arrived so early, my room wasn't ready yet so I wandered around Orchard Street at 7:30AM. It's the Fifth Avenue of Singapore, except smaller, clean, and palm-tree festooned. Also, it's in Singapore.
I ate a breakfast I may regret at a tiny local place -- half-cooked eggs, tea, and delicious toast spread with something green and something yellow -- and came back to my room. I slept for an hour. Now it's 10:20AM.
Time to hit the street.
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December 06, 2004
Zip codes made fun!
This map by Ben Fry is cooler than it seems at first. Type z to toggle zoom. Type in a zip code. Backspace to delete numbers. Hold down the shift key and type in new numbers. Oooh! The quantitative display of numbers! Or the qualitative display of quantitative numbers. Anyway: Ooooh, zip codes!
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December 03, 2004
Podcasting, hierarchies, new blogs and raw envy
I have an article on the political implications of podcasting at Personal Democracy. It's mainly about what podcasting is, and then it does the predictable political speculation. There's a terrific article on the same topic at CampaignAudit.org
And while I'm plugging me, over at Worthwhile I just posted a couple of paragraphs about some really interesting work being done by Jessica Lipnack and Jeffrey Stamps on mapping business hierarchies.
And if it's ok for me not to talk about myself for one brief instant, I'm enjoying Ayelet Waldman's Bad Mother blog (thanks to Liz for the link)
Ayelet points to a terrific essay about writer's envy by Kathryn Chetkovich. Why, just yesterday I muttered a curse about yet another author whose talent turns me crayon-y green. Oh, it's a long list alright. Chetkovich's essay is especially interesting to me because she refracts the topic through her position as a woman.
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November 30, 2004
Place dream
I woke up with a start this morning. All I remember from my dream is the image of a satellite above the beautiful earth and the idea that a place is not where you are but what you see.
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November 21, 2004
How to Fold a Shirt translated
For those who thought there might be some trickery in the fabulous How to Fold a Shirt video I posted about, here's a translation I found on a message board:
"Start by laying the Tshirt flat and sideways in front of you, neck opening to your right. Find the centerpoint on the far side and pinch it with your left hand, about two inches in from the far edge.
With your right hand, draw a line from your left hand to the right edge of the tshirt, parallel to the edge of the shirt. This brings your right hand to the neck-opening side of the shirt. Grasp the edge with your right hand.
Now, while maintaining your grip, cross your right hand over your left, towards the opposite (waist-opening) end of the tshirt. Maintain the same imaginary line you've been working on (about two inches from the far edge of the shirt, parallel to the edge) and add the new edge to the grasp of your right hand.
This is where the magic happens. Simply uncross your hands and extend them in front of you, lifting the shirt perpendicular to the floor. Complete the fold by letting the loose arm hole drop to the floor and folding the shirt in half over it!
PS: The msg board requires registration, so here's a link to the Google cache of it.
PS: The instructions work.
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November 19, 2004
danah on social interaction
Over at Operating Manual, danah is insightful about designing artificial social networks for interactions instead of for "users." (See disclaimer.)
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November 16, 2004
C-SPAN page
Here's C-SPAN's page on the Library of Congress series I talked at last night. The link to the stream of the session isn't working for me:
rtsp://video.c-span.org/project/digital/digitalfuture111504.rm
But that could just be a problem with my verkochte setup. But, then, what isn't a problem with my verkochte set up? And does anyone know how to spell verkochte?
(By the way, the decision to list me as a former advisor to the Dean campaign was C-SPAN's. I'm proud of getting to work with that campaign, but listing me that way vastly inflates my role in the campaign.)
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November 15, 2004
Off on a crazy week
Every day a different city, so long as those cities are DC and Providence...
Although it requires me to drop all pretense of modesty, I should probably remind you that I'm live on CSPAN tonight, 6:30-8:00 EST. I'm talking about how the digitizing of information is causing changes in the basic principles by which order and classify stuff, which is affecting the nature of knowledge. Ulp.
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November 14, 2004
Ethan's Freudian analysis
Ethan Zuckerman queries Overture to learn which terms our aggregated searches tells us we associate with particular localities. Snippet:
What do web users think about Brazil? That's an easy one: we want to visit, and we'd like to see some naked women. (No word on whether that's why we want to visit.) The top 20 search terms associated with "Brazil" include "travel", "tour", "hotel", "vacation", "carnival", "visa" and "beaches"... and also "girl", "woman", "sex", "porn", as well as "Mike", who appears to be visiting Brazilian beaches with a camera, meeting lots of naked women.
The Canadians, on the other hand, can keep their clothes on. We want their drugs - "pharmacy" and "drug" both rank in the top five search terms - and we're thinking about moving there. "canada immigration" is the 12th associated search term, followed closely by "jobs in canada". (The keyword selector tool offers some help there as well - if you can't get a job in a Canadian pharmacy, consider Sears or Wal Mart, both of which rank in the top 20 associated search terms. (The Overture data set is updated monthly, so these results reflect October searches - I look forward to seeing how these figures change in November.)
Pretty durn fascinating.
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November 07, 2004
Four phants and the gesture of the fig
I carelessly used the word "hierophant" at our family sabbath lunch yesterday and was sent off to consult the dictionary about its origin. Here's what we learned:
Hierophant. "1. An expounder of Eleusian mysteries; 2. An interpreter of sacred mysteries or arcane knowledge." From the Greek hiero (sacred) and phainen (to reveal or show).
Phantasy. From the Greek phantazein ("to make visible"), which comes from phainein.
Sycophant. "One who attempts to win favor or advance himself by flattering persons of influence." From the Latin from the Greek sukophantes or "fig-shower" (not in the watery sense but as one who shows), derived from "accuser," "from the use of the gesture of the fig in denouncing a criminal." Informer became flatterer, and thus we get "sycophant." The "syco" comes from the Greek for "fig," and "phant" comes from our old friend phainein.
Elephant. From the Greek elephas, elephant. The American Heritage Dictionary says, confusingly: "el-, akin to Hamitic elu, elephant + ephas, akin to Egyptian abu, elephant, ivory. It sounds like elephant was derived from two words that mean "elephant," but in any case, there's no phainein in it. ("At least not much phainein in it.")
We're still left with that shower of figs to explain. According to Kel Richards:
There is a story, recorded by Plutarch, to the effect that in Ancient Athens the export of figs was illegal, and an informer who betrayed an attempt at illegally carrying figs out of the district was called a “fig-shower” or (in Greek) a sycophant.
The story seems to be in Plutarch's Life of Solon (sect. 24):
He permitted only oil to be exported, and those that exported any other fruit, the archon was solemnly to curse, or else pay an hundred drachmas himself; and this law was written in his first table, and, therefore, let none think it incredible, as some affirm, that the exportation of figs was once unlawful, and the informer against the delinquents called a sycophant.
The