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Less than three months and I'll be in Japan!
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"To read a dissent aloud is an act of theater that justices use to convey their view that the majority is not only mistaken, but profoundly wrong. It happens just a handful of times a year."
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Some good advice, though I think those of us who do this all the time know most of these rules. Maybe I'm naive about that?
May 2007 Archives
A friend describing the web industry: "i feel like its a bunch of people wearing t shirts and blazers with thin glasses and tight jeans and coverse sneakers. trying to be ironic."
me: "and I'm standing in the corner in nantucket reds and a polo - collar up, obvi."
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Mr Jobs may well compliment his rival on the sale of the millionth Zune media player – a milestone that he may be tempted to compare with the 100 million iPods sold by Apple.
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A solution to the PDF document date issue? And maybe the title issue, too!
I saw this on Kottke the other day and it got me thinking about my office. The thesis is that ceiling heights affect a person's thoughts, creativity, and emotions.
My job, while perhaps the most creative at my employer, is still a bit stifling for me. I get to explore, but only within a tightly limited sphere. Contrast that with my physical office, which is an open work-group style space (no cubicles, yay!) with 18-20 foot ceilings. Is my mind subconsciously rebelling against the boundaries of my job because the ceilings are so high? Hmmm...improbable but a fun explanation.
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"Child, I don't need all that fancy paperwork—not as long as I have Jesus in my heart."
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The Stupak bill is just a way for an eager Congressman to grab the spotlight and act as if he's found a better way to run the economy than the free market. He's just a big kid with a fancy chair in the capitol ...
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The difference between the two possible definitions of “within 75 miles” usually does not matter much. But when it matters, it matters a lot, as it does to a former insurance executive from Oklahoma, Kelly Hackworth.
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The end is a mystery, but we know one thing: “The Sopranos” defied Aristotelian conventions. It is a comedy that ends with a litany of the dead and missing. Whaddya gonna do?
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The President's 40-horsepower touring car manufactured by White Motor Co. March 1909. Photographed on the White House grounds in the early days of the Taft administration." ...Cool!
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Next month, the morgue is due to move out, too. While The Times relocates into its new ultra-modern office tower on Eighth Avenue, the morgue will go to the basement of the former New York Herald Tribune headquarters on West 41st Street
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In relation to this week's New Yorker article about Lincoln
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The United Auto Workers has launched a big new push to organize the plant, trying to capitalize on fears of lower pay, outsourcing of jobs and on Toyota's treatment of injured workers.
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McDonald’s has opened a campaign in Britain to pressure the Oxford English Dictionary to redefine “McJobs” in a more positive light.
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Very cool
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Again, small changes yield big gains.
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Great idea: reCAPTCHA uses the standard "type the word you see" human-authentication technique to improve OCR of classic books and other documents.
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The CIA prints super-counterfeit bills. Duh.
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GREAT article about the virtue of delivering IT improvements in small bites. It's how I approach my web and tech projects - small, immediate projects to deliver maximum value to users and allow measurement to direct further projects.
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Incredibly interesting article about artificial intelligence and the future of interactive media. (Atlantic subscribers only, unfortunately)
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I like this both for the tutorial and for the example graph they've used.
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Interesting...
Saw this on Buzzmachine. It is indeed funny.
Two short items.
First, I attended TechCocktail DC last Thursday, the first event from the same folks who bring you TechCocktail in Chicago. I met some cool folks and learned a bunch about the tech scene here in DC, which is more robust than you might imagine. I'm looking forward to more of these and hope it was enough of a success that they hold them fairly frequently.
Second, it's well worth promoting that Ross has a new venture out there. DC Tech Events aggregates the variety of events in DC each week that technology professionals would be interested in. He updates it each Monday - it's got an RSS feed, of course, for your convenience.
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Cheap and abundant, coal is the energy that powers China’s economy, writes Rowan Callick. But it also may be the world’s worst environmental problem.
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"Imagine looking out your cozy Harvard dorm room only to see a bunch of black folks whoopin' and hollerin' in the Quad. What's an Ivy Leaguer to do except call campus security."
Does anyone else have huge memory issues with Firefox? I know my Macbook is a bit light on RAM (1GB), but Firefox is ridiculously sloppy with its memory usage. Things were running a bit sluggish earlier - Firefox was eating 450MB of real memory and 2.7GB of virtual.
I realize I'm a bit of a power user and open a bunch of tabs at once, but I do try to keep it under 25 or so, and I close them as soon as I'm finished. It really shouldn't be quite so bad.
I did a bit of digging and implemented these tips to try to reduce usage. Any other tips I should know about?
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"Instead, after considering the impact to their values and way of life, Amish communities decide communally whether to adopt new technologies." They're also not keen on being dependent on the outside world...
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This made me laugh.
A bit over a month ago, I challenged myself to abandon Mail.app and switch to Gmail for at least a month. Ross did this years ago, so I'm a bit behind the curve, but in any case I'm happy to report that the experiment was a great success.
I haven't missed Mail.app once during the past month and a half. Gmail with Notifier is as efficient as having a local client. Of course, what was missing was a simple solution for making data available offline. And then Google came out with Desktop for Mac, which has the ability to index your Gmail account alongside your desktop results. I know there's some debate as to whether that's even necessary in our increasingly connected world, but I think for the next few years local caching will continue to be a requirement for base applications like e-mail.
Last night I attempted an upgrade that should have waited until the weekend. Things went bad and my site was down for 24 hours or so. Sorry about that.
I have so much to post now but it will have to wait until the weekend. I promise I'll make it up to you.
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Yay for the alma mater!
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I think this is one of the most interesting developments of the year.
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Much love to Glenn Greenwald of course. My favorite blog by far.
This is a great video by Good Magazine that highlights how much advertisers pay for your attention:
(via Mental Floss blog)
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When does it become time for a ToS to be necessary? When is it the right thing to do?
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More and more papers are using Drupal for their online sites. Cool!
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Free icon set...
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This is cool. Calculate your grid sizes...
This year is the first year I can remember that I'm not going to be home for Mother's Day. I travel on many weekends (2-3 per month many times!) and just didn't have the energy to spend another 8 hours or so in my car.
Ann wrote something very nice about Mother's Day and has also painted a beautiful "bleeding heart" bush.
And hey, even mobsters take the day off. (via kottke)
This housing slump is really taking a toll...seller optimism seems to be shaky, leading to huge price cuts. 8.2 percent is a lot of money for a seller to have to absorb to unload their home!
Update: Saw this in my old hometown paper and thought it was interesting. Bank of America is offering "no-fee" mortgages to buyers, cutting 3-5% off the cost of buying. They claim their interest rates remain competitive...I'm wondering how much of this is a response to the down market and business they're losing.The average price in Westport, Connecticut, home of chief executive officers Herbert Allison of TIAA-CREF and Jeffrey Kindler of Pfizer Inc., and actor Paul Newman, fell 8.2 percent to $1.56 million in the first four months of 2007 from the same period last year, according to multiple listing service data. In Chappaqua, New York, where Bill and Hillary Clinton live, properties sit on the market an average of seven months before they sell, up from five months a year ago.
Wealth and excellent credit have until now spared bedroom communities in New Jersey, Connecticut and New York's Westchester County from declines in home prices. Now the tightening of credit in response to rising subprime defaults has disrupted the real estate food chain, bringing the national housing slump to Manhattan's doorstep. Prices fell as much as 18.8 percent this year in 15 of the 24 areas in which data was collected.
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Cool!
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"By the time they reach an age to think about what they'd like to do, most kids have been thoroughly misled about the idea of loving one's work."
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Love these.
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The explanations behind these resets is helpful.
OK, this has me laughing at 7am:
I'm a news junkie, so I subscribe to a variety of RSS feeds to keep me up-to-the-minute with what's going on here in Washington and around the world.
Lately, Anderson Cooper 360's feed has begun posting videos in their feed. Great idea - the show is highly visual, and bringing that to the internet is good.
Here's the bad part (and I'm going to sound like Jeff Jarvis here). They lock you into CNN's propriety Pipeline player (built on Windows Media, I think). What? Why? This is the age of the mash-up! Of distributed content!
First, I have to login to CNN to see the videos, which is ridiculous. Second, I can't share them with friends, family, and colleagues via e-mail or this blog. Is it any wonder upstarts like Youtube and Vimeo so quickly eclipsed traditional media in online video?
Google has begun releasing the new version of Analytics to customers. I got my first look yesterday and am very impressed. The new interface shows a lot more useful information at a glance and allows for a lot more data manipulation and visualization.
I analyzed a few of my projects last night and quickly got caught up in how easy it was to design complex comparisons between time sequences, pages, referrers, etc. I've read that they learned a lot from Measure Map. In any case, it's an impressive upgrade.
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The estate from "The Philadelphia Story" is up for sale. I love that movie!
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...this past January, the department largely shut off the subsidies by sending a simple letter to lenders — the very measure Mr. Oberg had urged in 2003.
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My my, this is interesting...
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Makes perfect sense to me.
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"I have stuck my neck out and predicted that the offshoring of service jobs from rich countries such as the United States to poor countries such as India may pose major problems for tens of millions of American workers over the coming decades."
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"People are so impatient nowadays. Everyone's rushing to find someone, get married, settle down, and have kids. Call me old- fashioned, but I believe in taking things slow. That's why I never talk on the first date..."
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"E-mail...often fails to achieve its intended result; a vague or carelessly worded message can cause major problems...Helping you avoid these problems is the goal of “Send,� an informative, entertaining, thorough and thoughtful book. "
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"If Mrs. Clinton were elected and served two terms, then for seven consecutive presidential terms the White House would have been in the hands of just two families. That’s just not the kind of equal-opportunity democracy we aspire to."
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I find this sea change troubling.
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I'm catching up on old New Yorkers...this article on microfinance is fascinating.
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Rotate, Scale, and Distort flat objects
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This is an interesting perspective. As someone who used a combination of Textmate, Firefox, and Fetch, I love Coda!
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I *always* forget to do this.