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On the Rocks I've never been able to explain to my friend Nate why drinking Smirnoff Ice is not quite as manly as say, drinking Shirley Temples. But even the gaming comic PVP Online seems to understand why Smirnoff Ice is not something to order, so maybe they can get Nate to understand.
Paper Tigers Malcom Gladwell's piece in the New Yorker on the role of paper in the workplace, is utterly fucking wrong. His thesis is that paper enables workplace practices and collaboration that are impossible in electronic systems, and that therefore practices like group collaboration via physical document notation and air traffic controllers using slips of paper to track flight information are better than electronic alternatives. Wrong, wrong, wrong. Gladwell fails completely in his article to mention some of the biggest reasons why electronic information manipulation (the "paperless" office) is considered better than old-fashioned paper.
Your Personal DJIA of Mood Moodstats is a visually impressive, Director-based program that lets you track various parameters of your personal mood each day, and also record some notes on why you're feeling that way, and whether you exercised that day (if you do such things.) After a few days, it starts generating some fairly nifty graphs of what's going on with you, and also allows you to share the data (if you pay the $15 registration fee.)
Flowchartin' Haven't see this before, but it's not new. Boxes and Arrows is a peer-journal for information architects. They need to talk to the GUI designers more though (as always) since it's damn hard to read white text on light blue backgrounds, and light-blue text on a light-grey background. Ouch.
Mouth Waterin' Good Design The New York Times review of Blue Smoke, a new Manhattan Barbeque restaurant, details the incredible lengths the owners had to go to so they could install proper smokers in New York - including a 15-story chimney for exhaust fumes. The question remains: how is the pulled pork? I'm going to make it my mission to find out, sooner or later.
EFF Alert The Electronic Frontier Foundation has posted an alert that Congress is asking for feedback on proposed legislation that would make new digital media technology illegal until expressly approved. Visit their page and learn how you can send feedback to Congress before this legislation becomes enacted law.
Here's what I sent. It's not great, but I didn't have a lot of time to write it.
Providing the media industry with the abiility to stall US implementation of new technology will fail to create any additional protection for copyright holders, while irreperably crippling the ability of our country to maintain its leadership in the worldwide technology business, a far larger and more crucial concern.Most piracy on large scale takes place overseas, and those individuals can afford the time to circumvent hardware blocks. It has already been proven that software and hardware copy-protection such as CSS in DVDs only serves to hamper consumer rights, while not providing a significant obstacle to copyright violators. This will be no less true of any other technology-based solution.
As an ex-journalist, trained in copyright law and intellectual property rights, I understand the importance of protecting intellectual property, particularly creative works. However, I disagree that the best solution to a social problem (copyright infringement) is a technological solution (copy protection.) This has never been true in the hundreds of years where technology solutions were used on sociological problems. The simple fact is that technology is not infallible, and anyone promising you that a system will be "perfect" or "unbreakable" is lying, both to themselves and to you.
I am a professional technology architect and project manager working within a leading telecom firm. In my experience, adding arbitrary obstructions to the user experience merely serves to disrupt user adoption and the ability for new media technologies to proliferate and become financially successful. They do not stop illegal copying of media any more than previous "unbreakable" attempts such as CSS and Macrovision did, but they will cause great harm to our ability to lead the world in technology solutions.
Sincerely,
Tom Karlo
Blind Violence Saw a rather odd altercation on the New York subway last night -- a fellow was standing in the doorway of the car (it was not rush hour, and there were only a few people getting on or off, so he wasn't particularly in the way.) Regardless, there was a guy getting on who was carrying a blind/visually-impared cane, one of those five-foot long fiberglass jobs. At first he seemed to be waving it gently around to feel his way into the car, but then he proceed to practically cane the guy in the doorway with it -- hard enough that the impact was quite loud. I don't know what his motivation was, but I suspect the fact people assumed he was blind and didn't mean it saved him an immediate punch in the nose. Regardless, once he got on the car, it became apparent that he was not blind. For all appearences he seemed pretty normal -- well dressed, somewhat older, perhaps a little portly.
It's amazing what you can get away with if just for that first few seconds when people would have the impulse to strike back, they think you might be handicapped, or not meaning to hurt them. If the guy wasn't so old, it could have been something out of an episode of MTV's Jackass. They've already had a few shows experimenting with how people react when an apparently blind individual, say, gets into a car and drives away in front of other pedestrians.
Kottke I was thrilled to get email this morning from Jason Kottke, author of one of the most popular weblogs out there. Exciting and embarassing at the same time, given the incomplete state of this site. I don't even think my mom looks at this.
Another mobile post - I'm at a Private Equity Conference at Columbia.
Pain After 6-odd months of sloth, I went and worked out again today. You truly pay dearly for time off. Just setting up the weights makes me tired, never mind actually lifting them. I guess there's no "save game" in that activity. Oh well. I've got a free trainer session on Saturday, let's hope I don't majorly embarass myself.
GPRS fun I'm posting this while waiting on the platform for the train home to New York, using my Jornada 565, a bluetooth card, an Ericsson R520 phone and Voicestream wireless. Fast it's not but it works, and it hahs neat implications for peer to peer journalism online... gotta go, my train is here...
Photojournalism The 59th Annual Pictures of the Year web site has some amazing images. It's hard to believe how many of the images from the biggest news events of the year came from a relatively small group of professional photographers.
His Own Worst Enemy SecurityFocus reports that an alleged eBay hacker has chosen to defend himself in court... but it's not turning out to be the trial of the century. In preliminary hearings, he argued that the all-caps name in the indictment didn't match his name's capitalization, and demanded that the plaintiff be presented... "[Judge] Ware asked him who, exactly, he wanted to bring into the courtroom. When Heckenkamp replied, "The United States of America," Ware ordered him taken into custody." The outcome? Bail was revoked, and he'll wait for the trial in a jail cell.
Cool Sucks Shift has an amusing piece on why it sucks to be cool. Those who know me personally will understand that this article was not of major concern to me, personally. Cool has never been my forte anyway, so I'm kind of glad to hear it's exchange rate is dropping.
My Next Web Server (Right) Or at least something really close to it. Mark my words, this will be the year of the small form, low power PC box for the home. The Linden Computech VIA Eden-based system pictured at right is about 2" h x 10" w x 10" d" and it will run quiet and cool. You're not going to compute the weight of the universe, or cure cancer, with it, but it will take the role of a small utility web server very nicely. Close-up image.
Shopping Rebellion Rebecca's Mead's not-to-be-missed report on Japanese youth fashion and culture, in the current New Yorker, is worth the long read. "Another recent trend was wearing boots with twenty-centimeter platform heels. There have been at least five reported shoe-related fatalities, one involving a twenty-five-year-old who died after tumbling off her own footwear, and another who lost control of her car's brake pedal and crashed into a pole, thereby killing her passenger." And we thought Japanese culture was weird back when they just worked twice as hard as Americans. I just wish they had hired a photographer to work with her on the article; photos would have really been helpful.
Why Cyborgs Don't Fly A fellow I have to admit I used to work with at MIT has made this week's New York Times for being the first "cyborg" to run afoul of airport security. Yeah, he's out there, but you have to recognize that anyone willing to try riding a bike down a Boston street in traffic while wearing a video helmet that entirely blocks his vision (replacing it with video monitors that hook up to helmet-mounted cameras) has cojones. And interesting wearable computing isn't going to be developed by anyone worried about their fashion sense. Steve's a genuine inventor of the old school type, but at times he comes off like one of those guys who wear aluminum foils hats to stop the mind control waves. Only in his case, he earned a doctorate at MIT and a professionship at the University of Toronto while working on it. A smart guy that most journalists can't quite grok.
(Update: Added link to wearcam.org)
Pong for Wireless Don't have an Ericsson phone with Tennis (Pong?) Here's a great version that works in a text-only web browser (no Javascript required, either!)
Someone reads Tufte A great hypothetical information graphics from Jason Kottke shows how an ideal map of WiFi (wireless ethernet) availability might look. My only quibble: the map makes it look like there's data for every location where color is displayed, similar to a infrared overlay from a satellite. WiFi availability data tends to be a lot more sparsely populated, and it also tends to vary in a fairly non-linear nature, making interpolation difficult. You can get signal at one spot, then move two feet over and not get anything (especially in urban areas where sigal reflects.) Perhaps there should be an imposed grid of vectors showing the direction to the nearest access point, kind of a like the wind arrows on a vector map.
*Tufte refers to Edward Tufte, author of The Visual Display of Quantitatve Information, Envisioning Information and a number of other great books on displaying numeric and factual data in ways that leverage our visual skills. A great lecturer, too. I wish more web designers were forced to read and digest his bibles on information design.
The Price of Stability (DSL Sucks) I've achieved some stability on this site, but at a cost -- I had to turn off the DNS that pointed Pixelfoundry and Weather24 to this server. Basically, even just the error responses to all the misdirected requests still going to those domainns (mostly image reqeusts) was completely hosing my narrow-as-a-straw ADSL connection. Cable would not have this problem. Sigh.
Anyway, with those pointed away, and a few other things changed to reduce bandwidth, the instability seems to have been cleared up. It only took me about 4 hours of my life wasted piddling around with router settings to figure out that the connection was simply too weak to even support a few web requests.
Google Bombs Seems folks have started figuring out how to artificially manipulate Google using Google Bombing. Ironically, I found this nice article by searching on Google.
I'll consider Google bombing for this site just as soon as my Earthlink DSL connection stays up long enough that anyone can reach us.
Lost? It seems a lot of folks are coming here or to our 404 error page while attempting to reach the Pixel Foundry or Weather24, two sites that used to be run by a company I founded. Sadly, they're not around any more. I'm going to create pages for both of those sites here and provide links to alternate sources of the same information. For anyone who was an old user of those sites, looking for what's going on now, I can only thank you for all the support over the 5+ years we ran them and apologize that the changes in the ad market made them too expensive to maintain.
Static IP Status Mindspring says that we'll have static IP available to this site sometime next month. That should improve things a lot.
If you've come here looking for Impromptu, PixelFoundry or Weather24, welcome. Those sites are no longer open (advertising revenue couldn't cover their cost of operation) but I've pointed the domain names here so that you can find out what happened. I'll also be posting pages with alternate sources for the information on PixelFoundry and Weather24 when I get a chance. If anyone is interested in hosting the 100+ odd original backgrounds from Pixelfoundry, I'm willing to loan them out.
Bah! The damn network support for this server has been going up and down more of then than the Dow. Apparently for the low low price of just $180 a year ($15 a month) I can get a static IP. Going to have to call Earthlink tonight and see if it's true.
