Business 2.0 presents the Bottom Line Design Awards. "Good design is nice to look at, but great design exhibits beauty that's more than skin-deep -- it integrates form, function, and market need."
NPPA Best of Photojournalism 2005: Still Photography Winners. Be prepared to spend a few minutes or hours with this one.
History of the NES (Nintendo Entertainment System) in the US. The first video game system I ever owned was an NES "Deluxe Set". I sold that stupid robot shortly thereafter at a garage sale and used the proceeds to buy another game. (Rad Racer, maybe?)
Low stakes Finnish Hold 'Em
After sitting down to dinner at Moustache in the East Village, a bunch of us pulled out our phones, which activity I've noticed is some kind of nerd group tic. Several at the table had the Nokia 7610 and we were still futzing with them when the waiter came up to take our order. When he saw the phone, his eyes went wide. "What phone is this? You all have the same one? What is this phone and where did you get them?"
We told him a little about the phone and he seemed impressed. Smirking a little, he set down his order pad and reached into his pocket. "Here is my phone," he said as he placed a recently-released uber-thin Motorola RAZR down on the table, stepped back, and crossed his arms proudly. We all pulled back slightly from the table, silent for a moment, and then leaned in to get a closer look with a collective "oooooh...." The waiter beamed, happy at besting a bunch of geeks at a hand of cell phone poker.
Screenshots of Katamari Damacy 2. I'll be a little disappointed if this is basically the same game with new levels.
In 1983, Stanislav Petrov resisted pushing the missle launch button in the face of an incoming attack (which later turned out to be false). In the 50 years of the Cold War, it's amazing that we didn't destroy ourselves, accidentally or otherwise.
Postsecret: send your secret in on a postcard and it'll get put up on this site. Like grouphug.us, but way more effective because of the handmade cards.
What is link prefetching?. Page authors can tell Mozilla/Firefox to preload a "next page" while the user is still on the current page.
Buzz Bin updates weekly about the most talked about movies. Die Hard 4? In 5 years time, all movies will be sequels.
Witold Rybczynski on the poor exterior architecture of the MoMA. "The five-story wall slices down next to the sidewalk with the finality of a guillotine. The brutal scalelessness resembles something out of a Kubrick science-fiction fantasy."
January was a rough month for me and I needed a break from all the "heavy" nonfiction I usually read, so I picked up Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, a well-received fantasy novel. I'm normally not much of a fantasy reader, but I was in the mood for something fanciful and besides, JS&MN isn't really fantasy. It contains fantastic things like magicians, Raven Kings, and faeries but belongs more to the 19th century British novel genre...more Jane Austen than JRR Tolkien. (Clarke lists Austen as her favorite author on the book's site.)
And it's just plain good, whatever the genre. The simple bold cover drew me in (it looks like the font used is a close cousin to Caslon Antique), but the plot kept me in "I can't put it down" mode until I had finished. A surprise was how clever and funny Clarke's writing was...I found myself laughing out loud several times at the book's cutting deadpan wit. The book weighs in at ~780 pages, but my only disappointment upon finishing was that the story was over...I felt like I'd just gotten to know the characters and wanted to follow them on all sorts of adventures. Luckily, Clarke is working on a sequel of sorts, according to the book's web site:
The next book will be set in the same world and will probably start a few years after Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell finishes. I feel very much at home in the early nineteenth century and am not inclined to leave it. I doubt that the new book will be a sequel in the strictest sense. There are new characters to be introduced, though probably some old friends will appear too. I'd like to move down the social scale a bit. Strange and Norrell were both rich, with pots of money and big estates. Some of the characters in the second book have to struggle a bit harder to keep body and soul together. I expect there'll be more about John Uskglass, the Raven King, and about how magic develops in England.
The first chapter is online if you'd like to read it and Metacritic has several reviews.
P.S. For fun, here are Amazon's Statistically Improbable Phrases for this book: new manservant, madhouse attendants, fairy roads, practical magician.
Edward Tufte and Richard Feynman's van. "The Feynman-Tufte Principle: a visual display of data should be simple enough to fit on the side of a van."
Wordpress is using its high Page Rank to game Google AdWords. This stinks like last week's fish. Is Wordpress and wordpress.org an open source project like we've all been told or is it a company? Either way, contributing to spam noise on the web is annoying.
The real identity of Belle de Jour is out, and it looks like she's really an author, not a call girl.
Where are they now?. What ever happened to the folks behind bluemountainarts.com, Ain't It Cool News, and Webgrrls?
A quick list of advice about writing. I like this one: "if you can't get started, tell someone what you plan to write about, then write down what you said".
Gastronomica on the traditional sumo diet. Use the link to the PDF version to read the entire article.
Bob and Harvey Weinstein to leave Miramax. Oddly, they'll still make movies for Disney with their new company.
Gluehands
When we were kids, my sister and I didn't have a lot of toys. What toys we did have were fairly basic but open-ended...blocks, lincoln logs, crayons, construction paper, glue, (very dull) scissors, paints, etc., stuff we could use to make all sorts of different things. One of my favorite things to do (and this lasted well into high school) was to take a bottle of plain white Elmer's Glue, spread glue all over my hands, let it dry, and then peel the glue off like old skin. I don't know why I liked this activity, but there was something about the peeling that was *so* completely satisfying. When the glue was drying, I could barely wait to tear it off my hands.
Imagine my delight then upon discovering some kindred gluehands addicts aficionados. A few weeks ago, while Youngna was constructing a birthday card for a friend, we busted out the Elmer's and went crazy with the gluehands. Here's some photographic documentation of our gluehands bender. More than 15 years later, the peeling is still so satisfying. I may have to pick up some glue the next time I'm at the drug store.
Josh Schachter has taken on some outside investment and is doing del.icio.us full-time. Congratulations to Josh...looking forward to seeing what happens.
Tim Bray is considering switching from a Mac to something else. "[Apple] controls the message, nothing that's not part of the message can be said, nobody is allowed to say anything except for Steve, and they'll sue your ass if you step out of bounds."
Paul Shirley, bench-warmer for the Phoenix Suns, wrote a blog for nba.com during a recent road trip.
Atul Gawande on doctors, insurance, and money, a trifecta that is a pain in the ass for everyone involved. "To me, all the members of the team deserved a million dollars for [saving my son's life]. Others were footing the bill-so it's left to them to question the price. Hence the adversarial relationship doctors have with insurers."
Measuring How NBA Players Help Their Teams Win. Over the past two years, Kevin Garnett has been the most valuable player for his team...by a significant margin.
Huge projections onto the cooling tower of a nuclear facility. Use "zuruck" and "weiter" to see more photos of the project.
Conservatives want to see more quotes from other conservatives on Starbucks' coffee cups. The content of the quotes don't seem to be an issue, only the political leanings of the contributors.
13 things that science doesn't have the answers for. Dark matter, the Pioneer anomaly, cold fusion, the placebo effect, etc. Some great opportunities for discovery.
Dot-Con Job: The Seattle Times looks at the rise and fall of InfoSpace. Very good reporting; the "mansions, cars, yachts" section is worth a chuckle...Jean-Remy Facq sounds like a very special kind of idiot.
Interview with some French food bloggers about the French paradox. "How do French women manage to enjoy chocolate, wine, cheese and bread without gaining weight?"
Look Up More. A fun "dancing in the windows" performance piece in Union Square.
@ the movies
Be Cool
Anything but cool, I wanted my money back at the end of this one. Catching a John Travolta film is always a gamble and he was alright in this, playing his typical Vincent Vega character, but the rest of it was just crap. I expected to like Vince Vaughn's character more, but it took about two seconds for you to get his whole schtick and then it just became really really tiresome. I did laugh out loud once -- Cedric the Entertainer as a reformed gangbanger-turned-rapper/producer/millionaire rolls up with his posse and they're all wearing tshirts with basketball jerseys over them and Cedric has a **button-down** shirt with a jersey over it -- but that was the only highlight. Metacritic, I will never doubt you again.
Five Ford hybrid vehicles race to find the slowest commute into Manhattan. The Holland Tunnel and the George Washington Bridge placed 1st and 2nd.
Andy made some significant changes to Upcoming, his collaborative calendaring site. You can now add personal events, tag events, get email/SMS event reminders, etc. Oh, and a REST API.
Bloggers in Malaysia are covering the earthquake. Several links to Malasian bloggers and aggregators.
The latest tsunami bulletin says "there has been no major tsunami observed near the epicenter". "There was however a small tsunami observed on the Cocos tide gage."
MSNBC is collecting first-hand accounts of the earthquake here. No reports of a tsunami, "everything is calm" in Banda Aceh near the epicenter and "most people have returned to their homes" there.
Scientists predicted another quake in Indonesia last week. "[Scientists] report in Thursday's issue of the journal Nature that stress is building in the Sumatra fault, where the magnitude 9.0 quake struck December 26".
USGS data for the 8.2 Indonesian earthquake. No word on any tsunami activity yet...let's hope it stays that way.
An magnitude 8.2 earthquake just happened off the coast of Indonesia on the same fault line as the 9.0 back in December. "'There is a potential for some wave activity,' said Julie Martinez, a geophysicist at the U.S. Geological Survey's National Earthquake Information Center, in Golden, Colo."
Adobe is announcing a new version of Photoshop soon. "Adobe says it added numerous features to Photoshop CS2 in response to requests from users and the changing needs of the digital imaging industry."
Is this me in a protest video from the RNC?. I actually can't tell, but it sure looks like me. The only weird thing is the bag...the one I have is not exactly like that.
Pretending to be a cook
Progress on learning to cook like a proper human being has been slow because I've been so busy the past month or so. But baby steps are better than no steps at all and in the past weeks, I've tackled cheeseburgers and pancakes. (Ok, you can stop snickering...I said *baby steps*!)
The first time I tried frying up a burger, I filled my apartment with the thick smell of burning cow flesh. Ok, medium heat then. After that initial misstep, I got it down. Burger goes in the pan, flip it once or twice, slap on a piece of cheese, and stick it on a bun with lettuce, sliced raw onion, thinly sliced tomato (there can be no going back to thickly sliced tomatoes now that I've done thin), mayo, and ketchup. I've eaten better burgers, but I've never had one that was more satisfying than one I've cooked myself. I can't wait until summer rolls around...I'm going to get a little grill and have some friends round for a BBQ** in the backyard.
The pancakes, oh, the pancakes were way yummier, fluffier, and moister*** than I would have ever expected from a novice cook working without a measuring cup on a halved recipe. I'm a fucking pancake-making natural!
** Hello to my readership south of the Mason-Dixon. When you grow up in Wisconsin, BBQ (or barbeque) means any meal cooked on a grill, regardless of the presence of slow-cooking, smoked meat, or some kind of sauce. Apologies to you and your delicious cuisine for my unfortunate regional vernacular.
*** Oh, it's a word alright.
An account of how a little amateur detective work helped a guy catch some identity thieves. "It seems that just this morning, the thieves made a purchase at a Denny's Restaurant at [a local zip code]."
The new issue of "This is not a Magazine" is a 5 MB Powerpoint presentation. Highlights include an analysis of the perfect Vogue Italia photograph and the political career of George W. Bush as high-calibre contemporary performance art.
The Smoking Gun has a violent Flash animation done by the teen who killed 10 people in northern MN. He also listed Gus Van Sant's Columbine-inspired movie "Elephant" as a favorite.
Fascinating interview with Jonathan Hoefler and Tobias Frere-Jones. Their dedication to their craft is inspiring: "I put together a list of words so that for every possible letter combination there is a word that contains it somewhere in the middle of it".
Do organisms have the capability to "bypass unhealthy sequences from their parents and revert to the healthier genetic code possessed by their grandparents or great-grandparents". "Pruitt speculates that the plants carry a previously undiscovered store of the related molecule RNA, that acts as a backup copy of DNA. Such molecules could be passed into pollen or seeds along with DNA and used as a template to correct certain genes."
Jeff Veen rightly rips into the entries in interactive design competitions. I can't even look at the results of these contests anymore because they're often so bad and non-web.
Transparent screens pool on Flickr. Making it look like laptop, computer, and cell phone screens are transparent.
Today's New York Airfare Report. This looks like essential reading for finding travel deals to/from the NYC area.
The Mona Lisa gets her first day off in more than 30 years. "In short, Mona Lisa has become like so many pop icons: a prima donna who puts outrageous demands on her handlers."
Bloggie Howser, M.D.
After I posted about the DVD for season one of Doogie Howser, M.D. being the worst DVD release ever last week, a reader emailed me the following:
Remember how each episode of Doogie Howser ended with him typing a diary entry into his PC?
So ... he had an electronic journal that was read by millions. Not a particularly conventional distribution medium, but wouldn't that technically make him the first, if not among the first, blogger?
Awesome! Doogie, you trailblazer, I'm sorry I bashed you.
Update: I've gotten two emails about prior art on this. Pete asks if Mr. Belvedere would count since he wrote in a journal during every show, and J. Curtis believes that Captain Kirk was one of the first audio bloggers (or perhaps podcasters?) for doing his captain's log each episode.
Iceland grants citizenship to former chess prodigy and current fugitive Bobby Fischer. Fischer is wanted in the US for "breaking international sanctions by playing a match in Yugoslavia in 1992" and has been stranded in Japan since July without a country.
Google is displaying ad keywords on AdSense publishers' sites. Another attempt by Google to turn ads into content (as opposed to everyone else who just wants to make ads *appear* to be content).
More fun unauthorized art: a plaque placed next to a museum fire alarm that read, "Untitled, 1993. Red plastic.". The "artist" took photos of the work, made up postcards, and they were sold at the gift shop.
More Banksy mischief: last year he erected an unauthorized statue in Clerkenwell Green. "It shows the figure of justice - whose statue overlooks the Old Bailey in London - with US dollar bills stuffed into her garter and a plaque on the plinth saying: 'Trust no-one.'"
Steven Johnson about why he doesn't blog during the book writing process. "[Blogging while writing a book is] like trying to compose a new melody in your head while standing in the middle of a full-throated choral group."
A previous Banksy unauthorized art placement took place in the Natural History Museum in London. "The graffiti artist Banksy has managed to smuggle in his latest work, a dead rat in a glass-fronted box, into the Natural History Museum where it was exhibited on a wall for several hours."
Stealing gallery space
This is the best thing I've seen on the web in the last few weeks. An artist from the UK named Banksy went into four of NYC's most prominent museums -- the Met, the Museum of Natural History, the Brooklyn Museum, and the MoMA -- and installed four of his own pieces of art:
Dressed as a British pensioner, over the last few days Banksy entered each of the galleries and attached one of his own works, complete with authorative name plaque and explanation.
He says - "This historic occasion has less to do with finally being embraced by the fine art establishment and is more about the judicious use of a fake beard and some high strength glue." Banksy continues -"They're good enough to be in there, so I don't see why I should wait"
Staff at the New York Met discovered and removed their new aquisition early Sunday morning while Banksy's discount soup can print took pride of place in the MoMA for over three days before being torn down.
As of now, the other two pieces currently remain firmly in place.
Be sure to click through to see the photos. As far as I'm concerned, this is probably more interesting than most of whatever else is happening in the art world right now and instead of tearing it down, the MoMA should move it into their contemporary art collection. Thanks to cityrag for the link.
Doing permalinks in Flash. Back button still doesn't work properly, but this is a good step in the right direction.
Ridiculously detailed bitmappy poster of London from eboy. They also have NYC wrapping paper, but would love to see a poster.
New technology could send data over human skin to all sort of different devices. "It may soon be possible to trade music files by dancing cheek to cheek, or to swap phone numbers by kissing".
Quick micropatron gift note
I've begun the process of informing the winners of the micropatron gifts via email. So if you contributed $30 or more during the fund drive, watch the email address you have listed at PayPal for an email in the next couple of days.
For the rest of you, here's a fun board game that combines Tetris with Go.
A post of mine made it into the "Trackback" sidebar in the April 2005 issue of Wired. My 24 yo self can die happy now.
Fascinating look at how all kinds, shapes, and sizes of life adheres to quarter-power scaling laws. "In subsequent decades, biologists have found that the 3/4-power law [relating mass to metabolic rate] appears to hold sway from microbes to whales, creatures of sizes ranging over a mind-boggling 21 orders of magnitude."
Riding Shanghai's maglev, the world's fastest train. "Four minutes of gravity-simulator-style acceleration later, in which the taxis on the parallel highway lose ground slowly, then quickly, then disappear as fast as if they were parked and you were whipping by at 220 miles per hour, you reach the peak speed for the tiny 20-mile run."
Postings to a neo-Nazi message board by the MN teen who killed 10 people. "Once I commit myself to something, I stay until the end..."
Ajax is now supported by default in Ruby on Rails. "We've gone ahead and more or less removed the need for hand-written client-side javascript entirely".
Superstar CEOs underperform the market after they win awards. "A study of a hundred recent corporate crises suggests that bosses who are charismatic autocrats are 'a major source of organizational decline.'"
pb is writing Yahoo! Hacks for O'Reilly. Paul, you've become a book writing machine!
The most expensive album never made. The story of Guns N' Roses' last album, many years in the making but never completed.
Eyebeam fellowship
When I started thinking about taking kottke.org full-time, one of the things I wanted to do was not work out of my apartment most of the time. But office/work space in NYC is expensive and I figured I wouldn't have room in the budget for it. There was also the matter of the proper environment. I just didn't want to exchange working alone in my apartment for working alone in an office. A smallish workplace with like-minded folks focused on similar projects was my goal.
So, I'm pleased to report that starting sometime later this month, I will be an Eyebeam R&D Senior Fellow for the next year or so. Eyebeam aims to be a center for art and technology and with recent projects like Fundrace, ForwardTrack, and ReBlog, there's quite a bit of overlap in what Eyebeam and I are interested in. They are not supporting me financially and I won't be officially working on any projects for them, but I will be working in their new R&D space in Chelsea. The hope is I'll not only have a physical place to work but that both parties will benefit from my presence in that space. That is, if some of their chocolate gets into my peanut butter (and vice versa), that would be a good thing.
So thanks to Eyebeam for their support of my personal digital exploration and am looking forward to working with the other researchers, artists, and fellows. Here's their post on the subject.
"kottke is having a massage". Warning, inside joke.
A young Harvard economist named Roland Fryer Jr. wants to use economic tools to "figure out where blacks went wrong". One of his papers addresses the six-year gap in life expectancy for blacks versus whites; he aruges that saltier black slaves were selected for the ocean voyage from Africa and that salt sensitivity has lead to "higher rates of cardiovascular disease, stroke and kidney disease".
Time to market for DVDs keeps getting shorter and shorter. Studios make more money on DVD releases, so they're eager to piggyback the DVD release on the big screen marketing campaign.
Menu collection from 1856-1930 comprised of over 5000 menus. Part of the extensive, near-exhaustive New York Public Library's Digital Gallery.
AMS2HID is an application that utilizes the motion sensor in the new Powerbook as a input device. Of course, one of the coolest uses is to control gameplay...one could imagine using AMS to play games like Katamari Damacy.
Ashes and Snow
Some friends and I checked out the Ashes and Snow a couple of weeks ago here in NYC. The exhibition features the photography and films of Gregory Colbert, who documents "the wonderous interactions between human beings and animals". Colbert spent ten years traveling the world collecting the moments for this show, which will be displayed around the world in a "nomadic museum". The museum, constructed out of shipping containers, is currently placed on Pier 54 on the west side of Manhattan, just below 14th Street, but will continue to travel around the world after it leaves NYC on June 6.
As much as I liked the photography, the building designed by Shigeru Ban was the star of the exhibit for me. The simple wooden path surrounded by rocks, over which the photographs were displayed and beautifully lit, the industrial feel of the shipping container walls, and the way the sunlight reflected off the Hudson River and danced through the cracks in the walls and across the ceiling...all the elements came together to create a wonderful environment for viewing Colbert's work.
Celebrities that look good or not so good on HDTV. "[Britney] is still in her early 20s, but she looks about 10 years older in high-def. Her face is puffy and she's starting to show wrinkle marks around her lips, reportedly from a two pack-a-day cigarette habit."
Barry Diller to buy Ask Jeeves soon?. Diller is responsible for the horrible Ticketmaster.
Genes in a woman's "dormant" X chromosome may not be as inactive as once thought. "Because the genes expressed from the inactive X are also expressed from a woman's active X, women get a higher dose of these genes than men. So these genes may underlie traits that differ between the sexes."
On Darren Aronofsky's next movie, The Fountain. It's "a love story that spans 1,000 years as a man searches for a cure for his terminally ill wife".
The history of yelling "Freebird" at concerts. I wonder if this ever happens at 50 Cent concerts?
Notes on George Dyson's Etech talk about Von Neumann. This is the one talk I'm very sad to have missed at Etech.
Online casinos offer bonuses to entice new players but you need to bet a certain amount to get it. But by playing blackjack by the numbers and betting the minimum, you barely lose any money and get to keep the whole bonus. Online casino hacks!
Seven years
I started kottke.org seven years ago this week. I forget the anniversary until after the fact every year even though I know it's sometime in March (for whatever reason almost everything important in my life has happened in March, at least for the last few years). Seven years is way longer than I would have guessed keeping the site going on a near-daily basis...it's the longest I've ever done anything, even longer than all but a handful of friendships. So happy birthday, old friend, it's been fun. (0sil8 started in March as well...nine years ago.)
March's evil award goes to the idea "of being too quick to judge others without knowing the burdens they bow to". "And [to] the poor providers of content, who given the choice between allowing others to improve on their work - even when enacted by companies like Google - and keeping it all to themselves, would rather 'opt out', hoard up their treasures, and forbid anyone else from touching it."
Interview with Danny O'Brien about life hacks. "I suppose what I learnt here is that going public improves the benefits of your work generally, though not always to yourself. Things that you put on the Web have a better chance of getting done, though necessarily by you."
When looking at the distribution of wealth, rich people follow a power law curve, but the rest don't. "While economists' models traditionally regard humans as rational beings who always make intelligent decisions, econophysicists argue that in large systems the behaviour of each individual is influenced by so many factors that the net result is random, so it makes sense to treat [the non-rich] like atoms in a gas."
Here's a look at the new screen fonts that Microsoft will start shipping in 2006. "The Microsoft collection includes two serif, three sans serif, and a monospaced face for use in programming environments. They are intended to be text typefaces as opposed to display faces that are used in larger sizes for headlines."
Google search for "micropatron". From 0 to ~73,300 in three weeks. Not bad.
Jessica Helfand wonders how scrapbooking fits into graphic design. My mom does scrapbooking...it's fun to share my interest in design with her when we look at the scrapbooks she's done.
Final call for micropatrons
Well, it's been about three weeks and it's time to wind down the kottke.org fund drive. This is your last chance to contribute to the fiscal health of kottke.org before the fund drive ends at noon ET on Friday (3/18). If you haven't contributed, here's the place to go to do that. If you still need some convincing, perhaps another look at my introductory post, the list of my business influences, or the list of gifts available to some lucky micropatron who has contributed $30 or more will get that wallet flexing.
So yeah, after Friday I'll post a wrap-up (because I've gotten lots of queries as to how it's going), contact the winners of the gifts, and then it's full-speed ahead, which will be nice because the overhead created by the fund drive, while necessary, has really slowed my progress on other stuff for the site.
Final call for kottke.org micropatrons. Fund drive ends Friday at noon ET...contribute now if you haven't already.
Trailer for Old Boy. This won the Grand Jury Prize at Cannes and will be out in the US soon.
Electronically file your federal income tax for free. "The Fed was going to develop a free efile site because its so much cheaper when you efile than paper file. TurboTax threw a fit because it would destroy their business. They came to an agreement that TurboTax would develop a free version instead of the government, then they just don't advertise it."
Eliot Shepard of slower.net is showing photos at Jen Bekman gallery. Opening is 3/22, exhibition is 3/23-4/30.
Family Guy Live!, four performances in NYC the last week of April. "The sensational voices behind the Griffin family will perform live readings of a classic episode" plus a bunch of other stuff.
SXSW 2005 adventures
I'm on the plane back to NYC from what was my fifth SXSW. I hadn't been for a couple of years and it was good (and a little weird) to be back. Some thoughts, in rough chronological order:
Best panels I attended: tie between Jason Fried's How to Make Big Things Happen with Small Teams and Malcolm Gladwell's keynote. Having read Blink and seen him speak on it twice before, there was nothing much new in Malcolm's talk, but he's a fantastic speaker...knows his shit cold, didn't utter a single "um" or "like", could make the phone book seem interesting, but doesn't have to caper about the stage to be compelling.
Everyone was nice. Well, there was that one guy who was an asshole, but I think everyone pretty much ignored him. But everyone else, so nice to get to meet you or see you again.
Overheard in the hallway: "no woman who knows that much about CSS should be that good looking", "here's how I met Marc Canter for the first time: I'm standing outside at a conference, he comes up beside me and farts", "I have no idea who you are", "surf the glue", "no one will get naked in the hot tub with me", and "Imagine Malcolm Gladwell...with breasts. That's how busy it will be."
My two panels sandwiched the keynote conversation between Bruce Sterling and Alex Steffen, so I was only able to catch about 20 minutes of it. But that was long enough to hear Bruce talking about smoking his shoes. LOL for reals.
BBQ! BBQ! In what could be a record for a bunch of folks who can't pay attention to any particular thing for more than 10 minutes at a time, fifteen of us waited an hour and a half for a table at Stubb's (cool menu pictured at right). I can't speak for the rest, but my beef brisket was worth the wait. As a bonus, Kathryn accidentally walked away with the primary object of our obsession during our 90 minute wait, the buzzing/blinking table-readiness notification coaster. I'm sure said coaster will be a treasured guest at many SXSWs to come.
Bruce Sterling's not-house party didn't really get crackin' until the geeks descended on the Zoob toys. The photo evidence pretty much speaks for itself here.
Ben Brown, because he asked me to. Many, many times. Ben, I expect you to comply with the terms of the restraining order from this point forward.
And finally, I'm at the airport ready to leave just after getting through security and I hear, "your attention please, Jason Kottke to security check 3 for a lost item pickup". Bag, check; rollie, check; coat, check; phone and wallet, safely stowed in the zipper pocket of my bag. What the heck could they have found and how on earth do they know it's mine? I zipped over the security check point and was waved over by a friendly/stern police officer. "You Jason?" "Yep." He holds up my wallet, which I swear on a stack of The Origin of Species was in my bag. "Holy crap," I said. "And that's not the worst part," he says with the most serious look I've ever seen on anyone's face.
Uh oh, I feel a full body cavity search coming on.
He pulls out my social security card and lectures me for two minutes on how I shouldn't be carrying it because it's all someone needs to steal my identity. Relieved that I'm not about to be hauled into a tiny windowless room for interrogation, I'm sort of chuckling at this point, which he takes to mean I don't believe him about the SS card. "Do you see me looking you right in the eye, son? That's how serious I am about this." Mr. Sir, as soon as I'm home, I'm taking my SS card out of my wallet and putting it in the safest place I can...right after I change into some clean underwear.
Yahoo! 360. Looks like Yahoo! has created its own version of Livejournal (blogs + social networking)...Flickr will fit into this nicely. ;)
Doogie Howser, M.D. Season One, quite possibly the most worthless DVD release ever. Sometimes the Long Tail should be a little shorter.
Amazon is searching inside its library for "statistically improbable phrases". A good way to discover proto-memes.
Mmmm, chunks
Some new research is showing that the number of things humans can hold in our heads while solving problems is fairly small, three or four things at the most. Chunking makes it possible to remember more complex tasks:
It's difficult to measure the limits of processing capacity because most people automatically use problem solving skills to break down large complex problems into small, manageable "chunks." A baker, for example, will treat "cream butter, sugar and egg together" as a single chunk -- a single step in the process -- rather than thinking of each ingredient separately. Likewise she won't think, "break egg one into bowl, break egg two into bowl." She'll just think, "add all of the eggs."
I wonder how much the process of learning is just chunking task variables into larger and larger bits, building layers of abstraction the way a programmer might build an OO program.
Interview with Jason Fried about Basecamp. "If you don't trust your developer to choose the right environment, then how can you trust him to build the best application?"
Burger Joint at Le Parker Meridian
After ice skating with friends in Central Park the other day, we hit the Burger Joint in Le Parker Meridien hotel for some much needed sustenance. This is one of those classic New York juxtapositions, a burgers-only greasy spoon (dinner: $8) in a midtown four-star hotel (rooms start at $300/night)...kinda like discovering an In-N-Out Burger in a Four Seasons hotel. Duck behind the curtain in the lobby and you'll find good burgers, beer (Sam Adams only), and an eclectic music mix (Bobby McFerrin, Edwin Starr's War, and some opera).
After we ate, JCN inquired at the counter how such an odd arrangement came to be. A hip bar previously occupied the space, but the bartender left and took a bunch of his clientele with him. The space lay fallow for a time while they figured out what to do with it, but renovating the space and building up a new clientele was too daunting for them. Someone had the idea of putting a burger place in there, so they put walls on the space and gave it a try. Judging by the full house in there and the terrific lines at lunchtime on weekdays, it's succeeded pretty well.
Game makers are designing games that are less daunting for the new player. With the side effect that the games are not so addictive, meaning that you can have a full life in and out of these games.
Their design approach is a big reason for Apple's success. Don Norman: "If you follow my [guidelines], it will guarantee good design. But Steve Jobs doesn't want good design. He wants great design, and my method will never give you that."
A lot of spam from Spamalot. A rogue script gave spammers access to email addresses of people who signed up for info on Eric Idle's Broadway play, Spamalot.
I think it's important to keep in mind that the number of weblogs added to the Technorati database and the number of weblogs being created are not the same, nor are the trends necessarily the same. In particular, I'm very skeptical about the huge jump in blogs created per day that happened in the last two months of 2004. It seems likely to me that could be more an artifact of how Technorati is finding blogs (found a previously undiscovered vein of blogs or something) or some other explanation.
comment on State of The Blogosphere, Part 1: Growth of Blogs, Mar 14
A blog reporting on the Second Life game. Discovered at the Journalism and Blogging About Online Worlds panel at SXSW.
The Long Tail of PayPal
While setting up the contribution mechanism at PayPal, I got to thinking about how PayPal is (or certainly has the potential to be) a Long Tail business. With lots of features, extensive documentation, tons of implementation examples, and no up-front fees, they make it so easy to sell anything to anyone worldwide that the cost of doing business for individuals and small businesses is almost nothing. My friends Tamara and Julie make soap in their apartment and sell it online for a few bucks a bar, with PayPal handling the checkout process and some of the order fulfillment stuff as well. And there are millions of little cottage industries like this scattered across the web, businesses enabled by PayPal each selling maybe a few items a week or month.
However, there are a couple of issues with PayPal's attempt to harness the Long Tail of online retail. Shipping costs are proportionally more expensive for less expensive items...it's roughly the same price to ship a $350 iPod as it is to ship a $20 book or tshirt. PayPal's fees are a bigger percentage of the total sale for cheaper items as well; they take $0.30 right off the top. That doesn't sound like a lot but for a merchant selling $3.00 items, that's 10% less gross (and a more significant percentage of profit), which could be a bit of a deterrent in wanting to sell cheap items through PayPal. It'll be interesting to see if PayPal sees a Long Tail effect benefiting their bottom line and tinkers with the fees to encourage more cheap offerings.
A day in the life of Darth Vader. "What it would be like if Darth Vader spent a day in his shoes, speaking only in memorable quotes from the original Star Wars."
"Under the Bush administration, the federal government has aggressively used a well-established tool of public relations: the prepackaged, ready-to-serve news report that major corporations have long distributed to TV stations to pitch everything from hea. Suffice it to say, I don't think this is a good use of the government's time/money, no matter who the president is.
Babu, a new restaurant in the Village, opened without prices on the menu, allowing diners to pay what they thought the meal was worth. There's a place in London that's been doing this for years.
AOL changes the terms of service for AIM. Update: IM conversations are still private, the TOS change was for public web forums.
Airplane hacks. Flight attendant fixes bad plane odor by wiping coffee scent everywhere.
Fantastic bunch of rants about the gaming industry. Really, this is what all conferences should be like all the time.
Apple to start shipping OS X 10.4 in April. Oboyoboyoboyoboyoboy...
The next Star Trek movie will contain no character from any of the other movies or series. The film, due out in 2007, takes place 160 years BK (before Kirk).
Collection of photos and drawings of the New York that might have been. See what Bryant Park would have looked like if they'd never removed the Croton Reservoir.
New Star Wars trailer
Once every three years, the first trailer for yet another crappy George Lucas Star Wars movie is released somewhere to great fanfare. And each time, I watch said trailer and get all excited. It looks great, I'll say. Maybe it'll actually be good. My hopes start to rise. And then the movie comes out, Natalie Portman is transformed by Lucas' awful direction into the worst actress ever, and I leave the theatre disappointed that a cher